Kerry O'Brien, A Memoir

Author: Kerry O'Brien
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1760637874
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1238

Book Description
Born the day after the first American occupying troops landed near Tokyo in August 1945, Kerry O'Brien's life has spanned the post-war era through the maelstrom of the nuclear and digital age-a remarkable time of intense and dynamic change that has no match in human history. He has witnessed life changing events, interviewed the great and good, and explained the intricacies of the world to millions of Australians as we sat in the comfort and safety of our lounge rooms. Whether strolling the history-laden corridors of the White House unhindered while waiting to interview Barack Obama, or talking with Nelson Mandela on his first day in the presidential residence in Pretoria in a room filled with the blood-soaked ghosts of apartheid, or receiving a haughty rebuke from an indignantly regal Margaret Thatcher, or exploring ideas with some of the great artists, philosophers and scientists of our time, Kerry O'Brien has sought to unearth the truth behind the news. In Australia, he has watched thirteen prime ministers come and go and has called the powerful to account without fear or favour. In this intimate ground-breaking account told with wit and insight O'Brien reflects on the big events, the lessons learned and lessons ignored, along with the foibles and strengths of public figures who construct our world. The end result is a memoir like no other - an engrossing study of a private life lived in the public eye and wrapped in nearly three-quarters of a century of social and political history.

Keating

Author: Kerry O'Brien
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1925268489
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 816

Book Description
Paul Keating is widely credited as the chief architect of the most significant period of political and economic reform in Australia's history. Twenty years on, there is still no story from the horse's mouth of how it all came about. No autobiography. No memoir. Yet he is the supreme story-teller of politics. This book of revelations fills the gap. Kerry O'Brien, the consummate interviewer who knew all the players and lived the history, has spent many long hours with Keating, teasing out the stories, testing the memories and the assertions. What emerges is a treasure trove of anecdotes, insights, reflections and occasional admissions from one of the most loved and hated political leaders we have known-a man who either led or was the driving force through thirteen years of Labor government that changed the face of Australia. This is a man who as prime minister personally negotiated the sale of a quarter of the government-owned Qantas in his own office for $665 million, then delighted in watching the buyer's hand shake so much that champagne spilt down his shirtsleeve. He tells of his grave moment of doubt after making one of the riskiest calls of his political life, and how he used an acupuncturist and a television interviewer to seize the day. There are many stories of this kind. The revealing inside stories and even glimpses of insecurities that go with the wielding of power, from a man who had no fear collecting his share of enemies and ended up with more than enough, but whose parliamentary performances from 25 years ago are watched avidly on YouTube today by a generation that was either not yet born or in knee pants when he was at his peak. We'll never get an autobiography or a memoir from Keating. This is as good as it gets-funny, sweeping, angry, imaginative, mischievous, with arrogance, a glimmer of humility and more than a touch of creative madness. Keating unplugged.

Kerry

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781847179302
Category : Kerry (Ireland)
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
The Kingdom of Kerry is both a visitor's and a photographer's delight. Everywhere you turn, in every season, there's a feast for the eyes, from magnificent sunsets to huge Atlantic waves to the bare trees of winter. Discover miles and miles of beaches, rugged peninsulas, inlets and cliffs, as well as mountains, lakes, sheep and wild goats. The soft rains produce an abundance of flora, like bog cotton and fuchsia, while the lush, sweet grass is perfect for Kerry's famous dairy farming. The towns, like Killarney and Tralee, are lively and welcoming, and the people are proud of all things Kerry, from their Gaelic footballers to their writers and artists. In summer, festivals abound, like the Puck Fair in Killorglin, Listowel Writers' Festival or the Rose of Tralee, while locals and visitors alike also enjoy great fishing, regattas and GAA. John Wesson celebrates Kerry's people and lifestyle, its moods and its magnificence. Come and explore this phenomenal natural wilderness, nestled on the Atlantic's edge. Here there is room to be alone ... but never lonely.

Unpacking the Boxes

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780547247946
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Former United States poet laureate Donald Hall reflects on his life, discussing his childhood in Connecticut, the works that influenced him, his education, his success and failures as a writer and father, his friendships, and other related topics.

When I was a Young Man

Author: Bob Kerrey
Publisher: Harvest Books
ISBN: 9780156027434
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Kerrey's much-acclaimed and fascinating memoir tells the tale of a young boy's life in Nebraska, his journey as a young man into the dangers of Vietnam and finally to the Nixon White House. As much a story of the American heartland at mid-century as it is a story of a man who rebuilt his life after it was wrenched awry by war. photo insert.

Country Girl

Author: Edna O'Brien
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316230367
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public Radio When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.

History's Daughter

Author: Maire MacSwiney Brugha
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
ISBN: 1847176232
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Máire MacSwiney Brugha is the only child of Terence MacSwiney, one of the greatest figures in Ireland's history, who died after seventy-three days on hunger strike in Brixton Prison on 25 October 1920. His death became worldwide news. MacSwiney is reputed to have been quoted by Mahatma Gandhi as the main inspiration for his own life's work leading to the downfall of the British empire in India; Ho Chi Minh said of MacSwiney: 'A nation which has such citizens will never surrender.' At the time of his death Máire was a young child. Her mother, Muriel, a member of the wealthy Murphy distillery family, had made an extraordinary and controversial match in marrying MacSwiney. The young widow then abandoned Ireland for continental Europe, taking her little daughter with her. For nine years Máire was to live away from Ireland, mostly in Germany with occasional breaks in Paris with her mother. She grew up effectively as a German child, speaking the German language, skiing to school -- and forgetting all about her Irish background. This was truly an extraordinary upbringing for the daughter of one of Ireland's greatest heroes. In the early thirties, when she was fourteen, Máire made a dramatic escape with her aunt, Máire MacSwiney, the sister of Terence, home to Ireland, against her mother's wishes. This was widely reported and led to a court case claiming that her aunt had 'kidnapped' her -- but Máire strongly refutes this in her account here. Speaking no English or Irish, the young Máire now went to live in Scoil Íte, her aunt's school in Cork. For the young Máire this was a very strange world indeed. Now she had to learn both Irish and English, her Irish being perfected by long annual holidays in the west Kerry Gaeltacht near Dunquin. And then, in 1945, she married Ruairi Brugha, the son of another famous republican, Cathal Brugha, thus uniting two of Ireland's most prominent and revered nationalist families. Throughout her life, both before marriage and later with her husband, Máire has handled a complex inheritance and forged her own strong identity. She and her husband have reinterpreted their unique inheritance in keeping their own time and their own mindset while retaining strong links to their unusual history.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other

Author: Darcy O'Brien
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497658713
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description
This PEN/Hemingway Award winner about coming of age in Los Angeles is a “little gem of a novel . . . a masterwork of Hollywood fiction” (Salon). He’s a child of 1940s Hollywood—specifically, Casa Fiesta, a ranch in the Malibu hills that he shares with his mother, a onetime Broadway headliner, and his father, a star of Westerns. But when his parents fall out of favor in Tinseltown, the narrator of this exquisitely crafted dark comedy loses his youthful idyll and accompanies his lovesick mother on a vodka-soaked international quest for romance and redemption. Meanwhile, his father lives in “diminished circumstances” in California, clinging to his silver-screen mementos, trusting that, someday soon, his ex-wife and his career will return. Tired of tending bar at his mother’s parties and listening to his father’s sad tales of former glory, the boy moves in with his best friend’s family in Beverly Hills. But nothing in La-La Land is quite what it seems, and when his new home turns out to be just as dysfunctional as the last, our teenage hero must somehow learn to accept his parents while finding the courage to break free and become his own man. This award-winning novel, “a kind of Catcher in the Rye for the Cheap Trick generation” (GQ), was cited by the Guardian as one of the “ten best neglected literary masterpieces.” Written by a New York Times–bestselling author who was a child of Hollywood movie stars himself, it has been praised for its “spectacularly deadpan humor” by the Atlantic Monthly and called “an insightful coming-of-age tale” by the Austin Chronicle.

Words Without Music: A Memoir

Author: Philip Glass
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1631490818
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 527

Book Description
New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Award Finalist for the Marfield Prize, National Award for Arts Writing "Reads the way Mr. Glass's compositions sound at their best: propulsive, with a surreptitious emotional undertow." —Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, New York Times Philip Glass has, almost single-handedly, crafted the dominant sound of late-twentieth-century classical music. Yet in Words Without Music, his critically acclaimed memoir, he creates an entirely new and unexpected voice, that of a born storyteller and an acutely insightful chronicler, whose behind-the-scenes recollections allow readers to experience those moments of creative fusion when life so magically merged with art. From his childhood in Baltimore to his student days in Chicago and at Juilliard, to his first journey to Paris and a life-changing trip to India, Glass movingly recalls his early mentors, while reconstructing the places that helped shape his creative consciousness. Whether describing working as an unlicensed plumber in gritty 1970s New York or composing Satyagraha, Glass breaks across genres and re-creates, here in words, the thrill that results from artistic creation. Words Without Music ultimately affirms the power of music to change the world.

The Girl Nobody Wants

Author: Lilly O'Brien
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1780880332
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
You only get one chance to live your life as a child, but Lily was never given that chance; her childhood was taken from her before it ever begun. From the age of four, when she was first sexually abused, her life changed forever; when she walked through the institution’s doors in Ireland, her life continued along the same path that has destroyed her soul. Her emotional pain is as strong today as it was the day it began and will never leave her alone.“When I go to sleep it’s in my head and when I wake up I can see it in the mirror and I am only waiting to die.” A child abuse story that will stay with you forever and one that you will talk about for many years to come, The Girl Nobody Wants is a harrowing true story that will appeal to fans of biographies and fans of Jodi Picoult. It has been compared to Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, Damaged by Cathy Glass and The Kid by Kevin Lewis.