Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

Author: Nina Sankovitch
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062092162
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
“NinaSankovitch has crafted a dazzling memoir that remindsus of the most primal function of literature-to heal, to nurture and to connectus to our truest selves." —Thrity Umrigar, author of The Space Between Us Catalyzedby the loss of her sister, a mother of four spends one year savoring a greatbook every day, from Thomas Pynchon to Nora Ephron and beyond. In the tradition ofGretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and Joan Dideon’sA Year of Magical Thinking, Nina Sankovitch’ssoul-baring and literary-minded memoir is a chronicle of loss,hope, and redemption. Nina ultimately turns to reading as therapy andthrough her journey illuminates the power of books to help us reclaim ourlives.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307279723
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

Mister Pip

Author: Lloyd Jones
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459616359
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Lloyd Jones' new novel is set mainly in a small village on Bougainville, a country torn apart by civil war. Matilda attends the school set up by Mr Watts, the only white man on the island. By his own admission he's not much of a teacher and proceeds to educate the children by reading them Great Expectations. Matilda falls in love with the novel, strongly identifying with Pip. The promise of the next chapter is what keeps her going; Pip's story protects her from the horror of what is happening around her - helicopters menacing the skies above the village and rebel raids on the ground. When the rebels visit the village searching for any remaining men to join their cause, they discover the name Pip written in the sand and instigate a search for him. When Pip can't be found the soldiers destroy the book. Mr Watts then encourages the children to retell the story from their memories. Then when the rebels invade the village, the teacher tells them a story which lasts seven nights, about a boy named Pip, and a convict . . .

American Rebels

Author: Nina Sankovitch
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250163293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
Nina Sankovitch’s American Rebels explores, for the first time, the intertwined lives of the Hancock, Quincy, and Adams families, and the role each person played in sparking the American Revolution. Before they were central figures in American history, John Hancock, John Adams, Josiah Quincy Junior, Abigail Smith Adams, and Dorothy Quincy Hancock had forged intimate connections during their childhood in Braintree, Massachusetts. Raised as loyal British subjects who quickly saw the need to rebel, their collaborations against the Crown and Parliament were formed years before the revolution and became stronger during the period of rising taxes and increasing British troop presence in Boston. Together, the families witnessed the horrors of the Boston Massacre, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill; the trials and tribulations of the Siege of Boston; meetings of the Continental Congress; transatlantic missions for peace and their abysmal failures; and the final steps that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. American Rebels explores how the desire for independence cut across class lines, binding people together as well as dividing them—rebels versus loyalists—as they pursued commonly-held goals of opportunity, liberty, and stability. Nina Sankovitch's new book is a fresh history of our revolution that makes readers look more closely at Massachusetts and the small town of Braintree when they think about the story of America’s early years.

The Descendants

Author: Kaui Hart Hemmings
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812982959
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Now a major motion picture starring George Clooney and directed by Alexander Payne Fortunes have changed for the King family, descendants of Hawaiian royalty and one of the state’s largest landowners. Matthew King’s daughters—Scottie, a feisty ten-year-old, and Alex, a seventeen-year-old recovering drug addict—are out of control, and their charismatic, thrill-seeking mother, Joanie, lies in a coma after a boat-racing accident. She will soon be taken off life support. As Matt gathers his wife’s friends and family to say their final goodbyes, a difficult situation is made worse by the sudden discovery that there’s one person who hasn’t been told: the man with whom Joanie had been having an affair. Forced to examine what they owe not only to the living but to the dead, Matt, Scottie, and Alex take to the road to find Joanie’s lover, on a memorable journey that leads to unforeseen humor, growth, and profound revelations.

The Futilitarians

Author: Anne Gisleson
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316393894
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
A memoir of friendship and literature chronicling a search for meaning and comfort in great books, and a beautiful path out of grief. Anne Gisleson had lost her twin sisters, had been forced to flee her home during Hurricane Katrina, and had witnessed cancer take her beloved father. Before she met her husband, Brad, he had suffered his own trauma, losing his partner and the mother of his son to cancer in her young thirties. "How do we keep moving forward," Anne asks, "amid all this loss and threat?" The answer: "We do it together." Anne and Brad, in the midst of forging their happiness, found that their friends had been suffering their own losses and crises as well: loved ones gone, rocky marriages, tricky child-rearing, jobs lost or gained, financial insecurities or unexpected windfalls. Together these resilient New Orleanians formed what they called the Existential Crisis Reading Group, which they jokingly dubbed "The Futilitarians." From Epicurus to Tolstoy, from Cheever to Amis to Lispector, each month they read and talked about identity, parenting, love, mortality, and life in post-Katrina New Orleans, In the year after her father's death, these living-room gatherings provided a sustenance Anne craved, fortifying her and helping her blaze a trail out of her well-worn grief. More than that, this fellowship allowed her finally to commune with her sisters on the page, and to tell the story of her family that had remained long untold. Written with wisdom, soul, and a playful sense of humor, The Futilitarians is a guide to living curiously and fully, and a testament to the way that even from the toughest soil of sorrow, beauty and wonder can bloom.

The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

Author: Wendy Welch
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250010640
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
An inspiring true story about losing your place, finding your purpose, and building a community one book at a time. Wendy Welch and her husband had always dreamed of owning a bookstore, so when they left their high-octane jobs for a simpler life in an Appalachian coal town, they seized an unexpected opportunity to pursue thier dream. The only problems? A declining U.S. economy, a small town with no industry, and the advent of the e-book. They also had no idea how to run a bookstore. Against all odds, but with optimism, the help of their Virginian mountain community, and an abiding love for books, they succeeded in establishing more than a thriving business - they built a community. The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap is the little bookstore that could: how two people, two cats, two dogs, and thirty-eight thousand books helped a small town find its heart. It is a story about people and books, and how together they create community.

Oh, Beautiful

Author: John Godges
Publisher: John Paul Godges
ISBN: 9781451508017
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 534

Book Description
AWARDED THE KIRKUS STAR! NAMED TO KIRKUS REVIEWS' BEST OF 2011 LIST! 2012 INDIE READER DISCOVERY AWARD WINNER! 2012 ERIC HOFFER BOOK AWARD RECIPIENT! INDIE BOOK AWARDS FINALIST IN TWO CATEGORIES! An extended Italian immigrant family clings to community life amid tragedy, the Spanish flu, Prohibition, and the Great Depression. A broken Polish immigrant family leaves a legacy of heartbreak, separation, Civilian Conservation Corps redemption, and World War II heroism. From these dissimilar backgrounds emerges a quintessential American family, one whose members embody the conflicting social movements of their times: a staunchly Catholic Polish immigrant U.S. Marine Corps father, an emotionally effusive Italian mother, an Oliver North son, a Hillary Clinton daughter, a mentally ill sister, a jock brother, a lesbian rocker, and a gay male activist. In an age of bitter cultural polarization, Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century celebrates what has kept America together. This true story is an engrossing portrait of an American family and an evocative documentation of nearly 100 years of American history.

The Image of Christ in Russian Literature

Author: John Givens
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609092384
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute. The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

Moments of Being

Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156619189
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Published years after her death, Moments of Being is Virginia Woolf's only autobiographical writing, considered by many to be her most important book. A collection of five memoir pieces written for different audiences spanning almost four decades, Moments of Being reveals the remarkable unity of Virginia Woolf's art, thought, and sensibility. "Reminiscences," written during her apprenticeship period, exposes the childhood shared by Woolf and her sister, Vanessa, while "A sketch of the Past" illuminates the relationship with her father, Leslie Stephens, who played a crucial role in her development as an individual a writer. Of the final three pieces, composed for the Memoir Club, which required absolute candor of its members, two show Woolf at the threshold of artistic maturity and one shows a confident writer poking fun at her own foibles.