The Erratics

Author: Vicki Laveau-Harvie
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525658629
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Book Description
Two sisters reckon with their toxic parents through the decline and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and with the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humor and brutal honesty in this award-winning “brilliantly-written memoir... [that] reads like a novel” (best-selling author Margaret Atwood via Twitter). When her elderly mother is hospitalized unexpectedly, Vicki Laveau-Harvie and her sister travel to their parents' ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help their father. Estranged from their parents for many years, they are horrified by what they discover on their arrival. For years their mother has camouflaged her manic delusions and savage unpredictability, and over the decades she has managed to shut herself and her husband away from the outside world, systematically starving him and making him a virtual prisoner in his own home. Rearranging their lives to be the daughters they were never allowed to be, the sisters focus their efforts on helping their father cope with the unending manipulations of their mother and encounter all the pressures that come with caring for elderly parents. And at every step they have to contend with their mother, whose favorite phrase during their childhood was: "I'll get you and you won't even know I'm doing it." Set against the natural world of the Canadian foothills ("in winter the cold will kill you, nothing personal"), this memoir—at once dark and hopeful—shatters precedents about grief, anger, and family trauma with surprising tenderness and humor.

Erratic Facts

Author: Kay Ryan
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190855
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Book Description
“Clear and lucid” poems from a US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner who “journeys through the landscape of memory, consciousness, loss, and love” (The Washington Post). Kay Ryan is acclaimed for her highly relatable, deeply insightful poems. Erratic Facts is her first new collection since the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Best of It, and it is animated with her signature swift, clearheaded, lyrical style. At once witty and melancholy, playful and heartfelt, Ryan examines enormous subjects—existence, consciousness, love, loss—in compact poems that have immensely powerful resonance. Her sly rhymes and strong cadences convey both musicality and wisdom. While these pieces are composed of the same brevity and vitality that have characterized her singular voice over the course of more than twenty years, her imagination is more eccentric and daring than ever. Erratic Facts solidifies Ryan’s place at the pinnacle of American poetry. “Read a poem once and take in its crisp rhythms, subtle rhymes, and arresting images. Read it again and detect its hide-and-seek metaphors and meanings. . . . [Ryan’s] quantum poems pose resonant questions of physics and metaphysics, of attentiveness and caring on scales intimate and universal.” —Booklist

Ice Age Floodscapes of the Pacific Northwest

Author: Bruce Norman Bjornstad
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030530434
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
This heavily illustrated book contains descriptions and geologic interpretations of photographs (mostly aerial) illustrating the power and magnitude of repeated Ice Age flooding in the Pacific Northwest, as recently as 14,000 years ago. The scale of Ice Age floods was so huge that today it is often difficult to see and appreciate the power and magnitude of such megafloods from ground level. However, from the air, landforms created by the floods often come into clear focus. Aerial images, obtained via unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) as well as fixed-wing airplane, add a new perspective on evidence gathered by dozens of scientists since 1923.

Poetic License

Author: Gretchen Cherington
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631527126
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she’d recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents’ well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth—even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her father’s extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father’s best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s to Cherington’s consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.

Just Don't Be an Asshole

Author: Kara Kinney Cartwright
Publisher: Rodale Books
ISBN: 0593138481
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Take it from a mom who raised two teenage boys into actual humans—yes, they can and do change. This is her tough love and candid advice on being a good guy in a world full of assh*les. Have you ever returned the family car with less than a quarter tank left? Or gotten a technical in a rec-league basketball game? If so, you might be an assh*le—or you’re at least acting like one. But there’s hope for you yet! As it turns out, everyone needs to learn one major lesson to safely avoid assh*le territory: Other people are also humans. (Whoa.) This frank, funny, and necessary guidebook contains everything young men need to know to have positive interactions, make better decisions, and recognize when they’re being jerks. Things like, just don’t be an assh*le . . . • To your family: Parents are not your servants. • To your friends: They’ll laugh at you, not with you. • At work: No one wants to hear your podcast idea. • To women: “Are you up?” doesn’t qualify as romance. • Online: If you wouldn’t do it in real life, don’t do it. • In real life: People unlike you are also people. • To yourself: It’s okay not to have all the answers. And if someone got you this book, don’t be an assh*le to them. Instead, consider this a gentle nudge in a different direction.

Erratic Wandering

Author: Christy Butler
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781540569875
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
"Erratic Wandering." An Explorer's Hiking Guide to Astonishing Boulders of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont: New destinations and fun adventures for individuals, couples or the entire family. A total of 123 chapters richly enhanced with more photographs, more GPS coordinates, more maps, and directions that will direct hikers and outdoor enthusiasts to some of the most astonishing glacial boulders, balanced or perched rocks that are scattered throughout the nooks and crannies of northern New England. Vermont 34, Maine 22, and New Hampshire 67 chapters.

Reasonable People

Author: Ralph James Savarese
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1635421446
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 538

Book Description
Watch an interview with DJ on CNN Listen to Ralph Savarese's interview on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show" Visit the book's website: www.reasonable-people.com "Why would someone adopt a badly abused, nonspeaking, six-year-old from foster care?" So the author was asked at the outset of his adoption-as-a-first-resort adventure. Part love story, part political manifesto about "living with conviction in a cynical time," the memoir traces the development of DJ, a boy written off as profoundly retarded and now, six years later, earning all "A's" at a regular school. Neither a typical saga of autism nor simply a challenge to expert opinion, Reasonable People illuminates the belated emergence of a self in language. And it does so using DJ's own words, expressed through the once discredited but now resurgent technique of facilitated communication. In this emotional page-turner, DJ reconnects with the sister from whom he was separated, begins to type independently, and explores his experience of disability, poverty, abandonment, and sexual abuse. "Try to remember my life," he says on his talking computer, and remember he does in the most extraordinarily perceptive and lyrical way. Asking difficult questions about the nature of family, the demise of social obligation, and the meaning of neurological difference, Savarese argues for a reasonable commitment to human possibility and caring.

Dead Rock Stars

Author: Wes Funk
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781927756416
Category : Gay men
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Book Description

One Bright Moon

Author: Andrew Kwong
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1460712390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Winner of the 2021 Michael Crouch Award, debut category of the National Biography Award: From famine to freedom, how a young boy fled Chairman Mao's China to a new life in Australia Andrew Kwong was only seven when he witnessed his first execution. The grim scene left him sleepless, anxious and doubtful about his commitment as a revolutionary in Mao's New China. Yet he knew if he devoted himself to the Party and its Chairman he would be saved. That's what his teacher told him. Months later, it was his own father on trial. This time the sentence was banishment to a re-education camp, not death. It left the family tainted, despised, and with few means of survival during the terrible years of persecution and famine known as the Great Leap Forward. Even after his father returned, things remained desperate. Escape seemed the only solution, and it would be twelve-year-old Andrew who undertook the perilous journey first. This is the poignant, resonant story of a young boy's awakening – to survival, education, fulfilment, and eventually to a new life of freedom. PRAISE 'An incredibly powerful book' Benjamin Law '[A] moving family saga, shot through with yearning and hard-won joy' Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald 'This book will live on in your heart long after you've read the last page' Vicki Laveau-Harvie, author of The Erratics 'Heart-breaking, honest, personal, Andrew Kwong's moving journey from oppression to freedom is inspiring' Susanne Gervay, OAM, author 'A work of startling clarity ... reminiscent of Angela's Ashes' South China Morning Post Magazine 'Deeply moving ... The unique perspective of a child ... places One Bright Moon in the vicinity of Night, Elie Wiesel's pathbreaking memoir of his early life prior to and of his time in German concentration camps' Meenakshi Bharat, IIC Quarterly 'A few pages into this compelling memoir proves it was written by a master storyteller' Sharon Rundle, Australian Book Review 'A profoundly moving and spellbinding story that perfectly illuminates the terror of the times and the irrepressible yearning for something better' Carol Major, author and writing mentor 'One Bright Moon is extraordinary writing that encapsulates long-term hunger as a background feature of daily life in Mao's New China. In the foreground are images of adults and children populating the world of the pre-teenage boy with a photographic memory who would later write of them. The book is rich archival material for the study of China's social history' Mabel Lee, PhD FAHA, writer and translator 'Reading this memoir is a healing experience' Devika Brendon, author and editor

Ten Thousand Aftershocks

Author: Michelle Tom
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 146071346X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
A powerful, poetic and moving memoir of family, violence and estrangement, from a stunning new literary voice. After Michelle Tom's house was damaged by a deadly magnitude 6.3 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011, she and her young family suffered through another 10,000 aftershocks before finally relocating to the stability of Melbourne, Australia. But soon after arriving, Michelle received the news that her estranged sister was dying. Determined to reconnect before her sister died, Michelle flew home to visit, and memories of childhood flooded back. Told through the five stages of an earthquake via remembered fragments, Michelle Tom explores the similarities between seismic upheaval and her own family's tragedies: her sister's terminal illness, her brother's struggle with schizophrenia and ultimate suicide, the sudden death of her father, her own panic disorder and, through it all, one overarching battle – her lifelong struggle to form a healthy connection with her mother. A powerful, poetic and moving memoir of family, violence and estrangement, Ten Thousand Aftershocks weaves together a series of ever-widening and far-reaching emotional and seismic aftershocks, in a beautifully written and compelling account of a dark family drama. For readers of The Erratics and One Hundred Years of Dirt. 'Emotionally visceral ... both destabilising and alluring ... Tom's use of language is so deft.' The Sunday Age 'A compelling narrative' The Saturday Paper 'An intricately structured memoir weaving the Christchurch earthquakes with the lifelong effects of family trauma and mental illness, Ten Thousand Aftershocks is brave, eloquent and suspenseful.' Louisa Deasey, A Letter from Paris