What Fresh Lunacy is This?

Author: Robert Sellers
Publisher: Constable
ISBN: 1472101146
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 427

Book Description
Oliver Reed may not have been Britain's biggest film star - for a period in the early 70s he came within a hairsbreadth of replacing Sean Connery as James Bond - but he is an august member of that small band of people, like George Best and Eric Morecambe, who transcended their chosen medium, became too big for it even, and grew into cultural icons. For the first time Reed's close family has agreed to collaborate on a project about the man himself. The result is a fascinating new insight into a man seen by many as merely a brawling, boozing hellraiser. And yet he was so much more than this. For behind that image, which all too often he played up to in public, was a vastly complex individual, a man of deep passions and loyalty but also deep-rooted vulnerability and insecurities. Why was a proud, patriotic, intelligent, successful and erudite man so obsessed about proving himself to others, time and time again? Although the Reed myth is of Homeric proportions, he remains a national treasure and somewhat peculiar icon. Praise for other books by Robert Sellers: Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed: 'So wonderfully captures the wanton belligerence of both binging and stardom you almost feel the guys themselves are telling the tales.' GQ. Vic Armstrong: The True Adventures of the World's Greatest Stuntman: 'This is the best and most original behind-the-scenes book I have read in years, gripping and revealing.' Roger Lewis, Daily Mail. Don't Let the Bastards Grind You Down: '...a rollicking good read... Sellers has done well to capture a vivid snapshot of this exciting time.' Lynn Barber, Sunday Times.

Serendipities

Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156007511
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
See:

Administrations of Lunacy

Author: Mab Segrest
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972980
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
"Whew! They going to send around here and tie you up and drag you off to Milledgeville. Them fat blue police chasing tomcats around alleys." —Berenice in The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers A scathing and original look at the racist origins of the field of modern psychiatry, told through the story of what was once the largest mental institution in the world, by the prize-winning author of Memoir of a Race Traitor After a decade of research, Mab Segrest, whose Memoir of a Race Traitor forever changed the way we think about race in America, turns sanity itself inside-out in a stunning book that will become an instant classic. In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded on land taken from the Cherokee nation in the then-State capitol of Milledgeville. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. To this day, it is the site of the largest graveyard of disabled and mentally ill people in the world. In April, 1949, Ebony magazine reported that for black patients, "the situation approaches Nazi concentration camp standards . . . unbelievable this side of Dante's Inferno." Georgia's state hospital was at the center of psychiatric practice and the forefront of psychiatric thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America—centuries during which the South invented, fought to defend, and then worked to replace the most developed slave culture since the Roman Empire. A landmark history of a single insane asylum at Milledgeville, Georgia, A Peculiar Inheritance reveals how modern-day American psychiatry was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, when African Americans carrying "no histories" entered from Freedmen's Bureau Hospitals and home counties wracked with Klan terror. This history set the stage for the eugenics and degeneracy theories of the twentieth century, which in turn became the basis for much of Nazi thinking in Europe. Segrest's masterwork will forever change the way we think about our own minds.

Hellraisers

Author: Robert Sellers
Publisher: Preface Publishing
ISBN: 9781848090170
Category : Motion picture actors and actresses
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed: On screen they were stars, off screen they were legends. This is the story of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, riots, and wanton sexual conquests--indeed, acts so outrageous that if ordinary mortals had perpetrated them they would have ended up in jail. They got away with the kind of behavior that today's film stars could scarcely dream of, because of their mercurial acting talent and because the press and public loved them. They were truly the last of a breed. This is a celebratory catalogue of their miscreant deeds, a greatest-hits package of their most breathtakingly outrageous behavior, told with humor and affection. You can't help but enjoy it--after all, they certainly did.--From publisher description.

Mad Mary Lamb

Author: Susan Tyler Hitchcock
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393057416
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
After killing her mother with a carving knife, Mary Lamb spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses; yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a new life. Freed to read extensively, she discovered her talent for writing and, with her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb, collaborated on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. This narrative of a nearly forgotten woman is a tapestry of insights into creativity and madness, the changing lives of women, and the redemptive power of the written word.

Inconvenient People

Author: Sarah Wise
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409027953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 531

Book Description
This highly original book brilliantly exposes the phenomenon of false allegations of lunacy and the dark motives behind them in the Victorian period. Gaslight tales of rooftop escapes, men and women snatched in broad daylight, patients shut in coffins, a fanatical cult known as the Abode of Love... The nineteenth century saw repeated panics about sane individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums. With the rise of the ‘mad-doctor’ profession, English liberty seemed to be threatened by a new generation of medical men willing to incarcerate difficult family members in return for the high fees paid by an unscrupulous spouse or friend. Sarah Wise uncovers twelve shocking stories, untold for over a century and reveals the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes – their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence – and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the ‘inconvenient person.' ‘A fine social history of the people who contested their confinement to madhouses in the 19th century, Wise offers striking arguments, suggesting that the public and juries were more intent on liberty than doctors and families’ Sunday Telegraph

We Are the Gardeners

Author: Joanna Gaines
Publisher: Tommy Nelson
ISBN: 1400215412
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 44

Book Description
Teach children that the greatest rewards come from patience, hard work, and learning from mistakes! In the #1 New York Times bestseller We Are the Gardeners, Joanna Gaines and the kids chronicle the adventures of starting their own family garden. From their failed endeavors, obstacles to overcome (bunnies that eat everything), and all of the knowledge they gain along the way, the Gaines family shares how they learned to grow a happy, successful garden. We Are the Gardeners is a whimsical picture book perfect for: Ages 4-8 Parents, libraries, classroom story times, and discussions focusing on springtime and gardening Households that enjoy watching HGTV's Fixer Upper Young children and families interested in gardening and plants After reading, children will learn: Trying something new isn't always easy, but the hardest work often yields the greatest reward The basic steps and process of starting a garden The importance of patience and how it is possible to learn from your mistakes You and your children will learn all about the Gaines family's story of becoming gardeners in Joanna's first children's book--starting with the first little fern Chip bought for Jo. Over the years, the family's love for gardening has blossomed into what is now a beautiful, bustling garden.

Disrupted

Author: Dan Lyons
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 031630607X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
An instant New York Times bestseller, Dan Lyons' "hysterical" (Recode) memoir, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the best book about Silicon Valley," takes readers inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today's tech startups. For twenty-five years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession--until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of "marketing fellow." What could go wrong? HubSpotters were true believers: They were making the world a better place ... by selling email spam. The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: The party began at four thirty on Friday and lasted well into the night; "shower pods" became hook-up dens; a push-up club met at noon in the lobby, while nearby, in the "content factory," Nerf gun fights raged. Groups went on "walking meetings," and Dan's absentee boss sent cryptic emails about employees who had "graduated" (read: been fired). In the middle of all this was Dan, exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, and literally old enough to be the father of most of his co-workers, sitting at his desk on his bouncy-ball "chair."

Barrow's Boys

Author: Fergus Fleming
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802137944
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 542

Book Description
Describes a series of nineteenth-century British expeditions into Africa, the Arctic, and Antarctica, chronicling the adventures of explorers who ventured into some of the most perilous unknown regions of the world.

Peter O'Toole

Author: Robert Sellers
Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson
ISBN: 1743539827
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Book Description
Peter O'Toole was supremely talented, a unique leading man and one of the most charismatic and unpredictable actors of his generation. Described by Richard Burton as 'the most original actor to come out of Britain since the war', O'Toole regularly seemed to veer towards self-destruction. With the help of exclusive interviews with colleagues and close friends, Robert Sellers paints the first complete picture of this much loved man and reveals what drove him to extremes, why he drank to excess and hated authority. But it also describes a man who was fiercely intelligent, with a great sense of humour and huge energy. Always insightful, at times funny, at times deeply moving, this is a fitting tribute to an iconic actor who made a monumental contribution to theatre and cinema.