The Wonderful Private World of Liberace

Author: Liberace
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1563119137
Category : Pianists
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
For decades, Liberace was known for his music, candelabra, charisma, diamonds and dazzle. Over the years Liberace acquired an astounding array of prestigious awards, including: Instrumentalist of the Year, Best Dressed Entertainer and Entertainer of the Year. He also earned two Emmy Awards, six gold albums, two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's highest paid musician and pianist. Best of all, he was known and loved throughout the world as Mr. Showmanship."" Relive The Wonderful Private World of Liberace in the reprinting of his fourth publication. When I started this book, I couldn't keep help wondering if I was doing it the right way. After all, it was so very different from the other books. One afternoon, I ran into Shirley MacLaine in a florist shop in Malibu. She'd never seen my Malibu place, so I invited her over. While we were having a drink, I discovered she had just completed her book Dancing in the Light. ""What a coincidence,"" I said. ""I'm just starting to write my fourth book."" She described a private place she had up in Washington, where she liked to sit outside, particularly when it was raining. She would sit under an umbrella and jot down the material in longhand. The solace and quietude of the place were very inspiring to writing in this personal style. I told here I was doing mine in longhand, as well, just as if I was writing a letter to someone. She smiled encouragingly. ""But that's exactly how you should do it ""So here it is a very personal letter from me to you, sharing an intimate glimpse into The Wonderful Private World of Liberace.""

The Chupacabra Ate the Candelabra

Author: Marc Tyler Nobleman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399174435
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Book Description
With its hilarious dialogue, trio of bumbling goats, and fantastically zany villain, this unique, laugh-out-loud story based on a legendary monster is sure to crack up kids and grown-ups alike. Like most goats, Jayna, Bumsie, and Pep’s greatest fear is being eaten for dinner by the legendary chupacabra—it’s common knowledge that goats are a chupacabra’s favorite food! One night, tired of living in fear, the impetuous goats whip out their trusty candelabra and head off to find the beast and scare it away before it can find them. Little do they know that candelabras are the chupacabra’s third-favorite food . . . and he isn’t about to stop there. This chupacabra has quite the appetite, and the goats are in for a big surprise!

Liberace

Author: Darden Asbury Pyron
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022611712X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 549

Book Description
More people watched his nationally syndicated television show between 1953 and 1955 than followed I Love Lucy. Even a decade after his death, the attendance records he set at Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl, and Radio City Music Hall still stand. Arguably the most popular entertainer of the twentieth century, this very public figure nonetheless kept more than a few secrets. Darden Asbury Pyron, author of the acclaimed and bestselling Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, leads us through the life of America's foremost showman with his fresh, provocative, and definitive portrait of Liberace, an American boy. Liberace's career follows the trajectory of the classic American dream. Born in the Midwest to Polish-Italian immigrant parents, he was a child prodigy who, by the age of twenty, had performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Abandoning the concert stage for the lucrative and glittery world of nightclubs, celebrities, and television, Liberace became America's most popular entertainer. While wildly successful and good natured outwardly, Liberace, Pyron reveals, was a complicated man whose political, social, and religious conservativism existed side-by-side with a lifetime of secretive homosexuality. Even so, his swishy persona belied an inner life of ferocious aggression and ambition. Pyron relates this private man to his public persona and places this remarkable life in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of twentieth-century America. Pyron presents Liberace's life as a metaphor, for both good and ill, of American culture, with its shopping malls and insatiable hunger for celebrity. In this fascinating biography, Pyron complicates and celebrates our image of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lamé. "An entertaining and rewarding biography of the pianist and entertainer whose fans' adoration was equaled only by his critics' loathing. . . . [Pyron] persuasively argues that Liberace, thoroughly and rigorously trained, was a genuine musician as well as a brilliant showman. . . . [A]n immensely entertaining story that should be fascinating and pleasurable to anyone with an interest in American popular culture."—Kirkus Reviews "This is a wonderful book, what biography ought to be and so seldom is."—Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph "[A]bsorbing and insightful. . . . Pyron's interests are far-ranging and illuminating-from the influence of a Roman Catholic sensibility on Liberace and gay culture to the aesthetics of television and the social importance of self-improvement books in the 1950s. Finally, he achieves what many readers might consider impossible: a persuasive case for Liberace's life and times as the embodiment of an important cultural moment."—Publishers Weekly "Liberace, coming on top of his amazing life of Margaret Mitchell, Southern Daughter, puts Darden Pyron in the very first rank of American biographers. His books are as exciting as the lives of his subjects."—Tom Wolfe "Fascinating, thoughtful, exhaustive, and well-written, this book will serve as the standard biography of a complex icon of American popular culture."—Library Journal

Liberace Extravaganza!

Author: Connie Furr Soloman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062202561
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Known for his spectacular performances, the magnificent Wladziu Valentino Liberace was a world-renowned star in the entertainment industry for more than four decades, and his dazzling, often outrageous costumes are what made him most memorable. In Liberace Extravaganza! the entertainer's sequined, bejeweled, and rhinestone-studded outfits, as well as his extravagant collection of furs, feather capes, sparkling bow ties, and custom-made shoes are exhibited in book form for the very first time. These mesmerizing costumes grew from Liberace's humble beginnings when, as a young man, he would perform in his brother's hand-me-downs. From there, his suits, worth as much as twenty-four thousand dollars, featured layers of silk and satin ruffles, Swarovski crystal rhinestones, and fourteen-karat white-gold, diamond-encrusted buttons, culminating in his "electric" costumes with four thousand light bulbs weighing more than twenty-five pounds. Michael Travis, Liberace's principal designer, has written the foreword for this breathtaking volume. Jim Lapidus, another of Liberace's designers, furrier Anna Nateece, and Ray Arnett, his producer, have contributed original sketches used to design Liberace's costumes. The result is a book that is one of a kind: a celebration of the legendary performer and a visual feast of the most extraordinary costumes ever created. With more than 260 full-color photographs

Love Life

Author: Rob Lowe
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451685750
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
On the heels of his New York Times bestselling Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe is back with an entertaining collection that “invites readers into his world with easy charm and disarming frankness” (Kirkus Reviews). After the incredible response to his acclaimed bestseller, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe was convinced to mine his experiences for even more stories. The result is Love Life, a memoir about men and women, actors and producers, art and commerce, fathers and sons, movies and TV, addiction and recovery, sex and love. Among the adventures he describes in these pages are: · His visit, as a young man, to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, where the naïve actor made a surprising discovery in the hot tub. · The time, as a boy growing up in Malibu, he discovered a vibrator belonging to his best friend’s mother. · What it’s like to be the star and producer of a flop TV show. · How an actor prepares, for Californification, Parks and Recreation, and numerous other roles. · His hilarious account of coaching a kid’s basketball team dominated by helicopter parents. · How his great, great, great, great, great grandfather may have inspired everything from his love of The West Wing to his taste in classic American architecture. · His first visit to college, with his son, who is going to receive the education his father never got. · The time a major movie star stole his girlfriend. Linked by common themes and his philosophical perspective on love—and life—Lowe’s writing “is loaded with showbiz anecdotes, self-deprecating tales, and has a general sweetness” (New York Post).

The Sot-Weed Factor

Author: John Barth
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1628972009
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 737

Book Description
This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the 18th-century picaresque novel-think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy -is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It's the late 17th century and Ebenezer Cooke is a poet, dutiful son and determined virgin who travels from England to Maryland to take possession of his father's tobacco (or "sot weed") plantation. He is also eventually given to believe that he has been commissioned by the third Lord Baltimore to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. But things are not always what they seem. Actually, things are almost never what they seem. Not since Candide has a steadfast soul witnessed so many strange scenes or faced so many perils. Pirates, Indians, shrewd prostitutes, armed insurrectionists - Cooke endures them all, plus assaults on his virginity from both women and men. Barth's language is impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals. For good measure he throws in stories within stories, including the funniest retelling of the Pocahontas tale -revealed to us in the "secret" journals of Capt. John Smith - that anyone has ever dared to tell." —Time Magazine

Between the Lines

Author: Jodi Picoult
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451635818
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Told in their separate voices, sixteen-year-old Prince Oliver, who wants to break free of his fairy-tale existence, and fifteen-year-old Delilah, a loner obsessed with Prince Oliver and the book in which he exists, work together to seek his freedom.

Liberace

Author: Bob Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780312014698
Category : Closeted gays
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
Reveals for the first time both the public and secret life of one of American's greatest success stories.

Unsinkable

Author: Debbie Reynolds
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062213679
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Unsinkable is the definitive memoir by film legend and Hollywood icon Debbie Reynolds. In Unsinkable, the late great actress, comedienne, singer, and dancer Debbie Reynolds shares the highs and lows of her life as an actress during Hollywood’s Golden Age, anecdotes about her lifelong friendship with Elizabeth Taylor, her experiences as the foremost collector of Hollywood memorabilia, and intimate details of her marriages and family life with her children, Carrie and Todd Fisher. A story of heartbreak, hope, and survival, “America’s Sweetheart” Debbie Reynolds picks up where she left off in her first memoir, Debbie: My Life, and is illustrated with previously unpublished photos from Reynolds’s personal collection. Debbie Reynolds died on December 28, 2016, at the age of 84, just one day after the death of her daughter, actress and author Carrie Fisher.

Ultraluminous

Author: Katherine Faw
Publisher: MCD
ISBN: 0374716641
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
One of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved in 2017," a BOMB's Looking Back on 2017: Literature Selection, a Paris Review Staff Pick, and one of Vulture's 10 Best Thriller Books of 2017. Girlfriend. Prostitute. Addict. Terrorist? Who is K? The daring new novel from Katherine Faw, the brilliant author of Young God, is a scintillating story of money, sex, and power told in Faw’s viciously sharp prose. A high-end, girlfriend-experience prostitute has just returned to her native New York City after more than a decade abroad—in Dubai, with a man she recalls only as the Sheikh—but it’s unclear why exactly she’s come back. Did things go bad for her? Does she have scores to settle? Regardless, she has quickly made herself at home. She’s set up a rotation of clients—all of them in finance—each of whom has different delusions of how he is important to her. And she’s also met a man whom she doesn’t charge—a damaged former Army Ranger, back from Afghanistan. Her days are strangely orderly: A repetition of dinners, personal grooming, museum exhibitions, sex, Duane Reades (she likes the sushi), cosmology, sex, gallery shows, nightclubs, heroin, sex, and art films (which she finds soothing). She finds the pattern confirming, but does she really believe it’s sustainable? Or do the barely discernible rifts in her routine suggest that something else is percolating under the surface? Could she have fallen for one of her bankers? Or do those supposed rifts suggest a pattern within the pattern, a larger scheme she’s not showing us, a truth that won’t be revealed until we can see everything?