Half a Life

Half a Life PDF Author: Darin Strauss
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679643826
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
In this powerful, unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Darin Strauss examines the far-reaching consequences of the tragic moment that has shadowed his whole life. In his last month of high school, he was behind the wheel of his dad's Oldsmobile, driving with friends, heading off to play mini-golf. Then: a classmate swerved in front of his car. The collision resulted in her death. With piercing insight and stark prose, Darin Strauss leads us on a deeply personal, immediate, and emotional journey—graduating high school, going away to college, starting his writing career, falling in love with his future wife, becoming a father. Along the way, he takes a hard look at loss and guilt, maturity and accountability, hope and, at last, acceptance. The result is a staggering, uplifting tour de force. Look for special features inside, including an interview with Colum McCann.

Half a Life

Half a Life PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307370593
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

Half a Life

Half a Life PDF Author: Jill Ciment
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1101905484
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
Jill Ciment weaves an unforgettable tale of survival, compassion, and courage, in this haunting recollection of a child surrounded by confusion and madness, and her struggle to find an identity. Half a Life traces Jill Ciment's family from Toronto to the California desert—a landscape and culture so alien to her father that the last vestiges of sanity leave him. As madness engulfs him he becomes increasingly brutal and the family, grasping at survival, throws him out the door. Having no understanding that he has done anything wrong, he first lives in his car at the end of the driveway, waiting to be invited back in, before exiting completely from their lives. Poor and fatherless, Ciment spends the years from age fourteen to seventeen, as a gang girl, a professional forger, a stripper, a corporate spy, and finally, a high school dropout who by age eighteen has seduced her art teacher, a man nearly three decades her senior and bluffed her way into college in an effort to shape a future. Ciment is cutting, insightful and clearly unapologetic as she details the confusion and bravado of a child heroine whose dreams and tenacity allow her finally, to create the life she has been so desperately seeking.

Life and a Half

Life and a Half PDF Author: Sony Labou Tansi
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253222877
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Book Description
This crisp translation by Alison Dundy maintains the fast-paced action and bitingly satiric tone of the original.

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life PDF Author: James Hollis
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101216697
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
What does it really mean to be a grown up in today’s world? We assume that once we “get it together” with the right job, marry the right person, have children, and buy a home, all is settled and well. But adulthood presents varying levels of growth, and is rarely the respite of stability we expected. Turbulent emotional shifts can take place anywhere between the age of thirty-five and seventy when we question the choices we’ve made, realize our limitations, and feel stuck—commonly known as the “midlife crisis.” Jungian psycho-analyst James Hollis believes it is only in the second half of life that we can truly come to know who we are and thus create a life that has meaning. In Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Hollis explores the ways we can grow and evolve to fully become ourselves when the traditional roles of adulthood aren’t quite working for us, revealing a new way of uncovering and embracing our authentic selves. Offering wisdom to anyone facing a career that no longer seems fulfilling, a long-term relationship that has shifted, or family transitions that raise issues of aging and mortality, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life provides a reassuring message and a crucial bridge across this critical passage of adult development.

Becoming a Man

Becoming a Man PDF Author: Paul Monette
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480473863
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
The National Book Award–winning coming-out memoir. “One of the most complex, moral, personal, and political books to have been written about gay life” (LA Weekly). Paul Monette grew up all-American, Catholic, overachieving . . . and closeted. As a child of the 1950s, a time when a kid suspected of being a “homo” would routinely be beaten up, Monette kept his secret throughout his adolescence. He wrestled with his sexuality for the first thirty years of his life, priding himself on his ability to “pass” for straight. The story of his journey to adulthood and to self-acceptance with grace and honesty, this intimate portrait of a young man’s struggle with his own desires is witty, humorous, and deeply felt. Before his death of complications from AIDS in 1995, Monette was an outspoken activist crusading for gay rights. Becoming a Man shows his courageous path to stand up for his own right to love and be loved. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Paul Monette including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the Paul Monette papers of the UCLA Library Special Collections.

The Other Half of Life

The Other Half of Life PDF Author: Kim Ablon Whitney
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
ISBN: 0375844228
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
A heartbreaking novel based on the true story of a World War II voyage. In May of 1939, the SS St. Francis sets sail from Germany, carrying German Jews and other refugees away from Hitler’s regime. The passengers believe they are bound for freedom in Cuba and eventually the United States, but not all of them are celebrating. Fifteen-year-old Thomas is anxious about his parents and didn’t want to leave Germany: his father, a Jew, has been imprisoned and his mother, a Christian, is left behind, alone. Fourteen-yearold Priska has her family with her, and she’s determined to enjoy the voyage, looking forward to their new lives. Based on the true story of the MS St. Louis, this historical young adult novel imagines two travelers and the lives they may have lived until events, and immigration laws, conspired to change their fates. Kim Ablon Whitney did meticulous research on the voyage of the St. Louis to craft her compelling and moving story about this little-known event in history.

The Second Half of Your Life

The Second Half of Your Life PDF Author: Jill Shaw Ruddock
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0091939496
Category : Middle-aged women
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Whoever you are at this moment, you have a choice. You can believe menopause signals the end or you can make a few small changes to finally become the person you always thought you could be. In her groundbreaking book, Jill Shaw Ruddock offers answers to the questions women think and care about at this time of their life. 'The change' is not just physical but cerebral as well. Although a woman can no longer create life, this is the time when she can give birth to herself. Drawing on her extensive experience, research and interviews, Jill Shaw Ruddock scrutinises what could be holding you back and provides practical, hands-on advice on how to harness the new-found focus that menopause brings. From money to the mind, dating to divorce, exercise to eating and separation to self-expression, Ruddock's inspiring book sets out a game plan to prepare and guide you to make the second half of your life the best half.

The Second Half of Life

The Second Half of Life PDF Author: Angeles Arrien
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458770729
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
When you find the courage to change at midlife, Angeles Arrien teaches, a miracle happens. Your character is opened, deepened, strengthened, softened. You return to your souls highest values. You are now prepared to create your legacy: an imprint of your dream for our world - a dream that can fully come true in The Second Half of Life. Worki...
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