A Cure For Gravity

Author: Joe Jackson
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306810018
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
"Part memoir, part discourse on the art of music. . . . This is an intelligent, thoughtful look into the mind of an artist."--New York Times Book Review Since the release of his first best-selling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music-business fashion. He has also been a famously private person, whose lack of interest in his own celebrity has been interpreted by some as aloofness. That reputation is shattered by A Cure for Gravity, Jackson's enormously funny and revealing memoir of growing up musical, from a culturally impoverished childhood in a rough English port town to the Royal Academy of Music, through London's Punk and New Wave scenes, up to the brink of pop stardom. Jackson describes his life as a teenage Beethoven fanatic; his early piano gigs for audiences of glass-throwing skinheads; and his days on the road with long-forgotten club bands. Far from a standard-issue celebrity autobiography, A Cure for Gravity is a smart, passionate book about music, the creative process, and coming of age as an artist. Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award Finalist

Letting Go of Gravity

Author: Meg Leder
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1534403183
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
“[An] absorbing novel that will appeal to fans of Rainbow Rowell.” —Booklist “A poignant and carefully crafted story.” —School Library Journal “A gorgeous, sad, funny, and wise book about letting go and finding your place in the world.” —Kathleen Glasgow, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces Parker struggles to reconnect with her twin brother, Charlie—who’s recovering from cancer—as she tries to deal with her anxiety about the future in this powerful new novel. Twins Parker and Charlie are polar opposites. Where Charlie is fearless, Parker is careful. Charlie is confident while Parker aims to please. Charlie is outgoing and outspoken; Parker is introverted and reserved. And of course, there’s the one other major difference: Charlie got cancer. Parker didn’t. But now that Charlie is officially in remission, life couldn’t be going better for Parker. She’s landed a prestigious summer internship at the hospital and is headed to Harvard in the fall to study pediatric oncology—which is why the anxiety she’s felt since her Harvard acceptance is so unsettling. And it doesn’t help that her relationship with Charlie has been on the rocks since his diagnosis. Enter Finn, a boy who’s been leaving strange graffiti messages all over town. Parker can’t stop thinking about those messages, or about Finn, who makes her feel free for the first time: free to doubt, free to make mistakes, and free to confront the truth that Parker has been hiding from for a long time. That she keeps trying to save Charlie, when the person who really needs saving is herself.

The Pull of Gravity

Author: Gae Polisner
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ISBN: 1429923156
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
While Nick Gardner's family is falling apart, his best friend, Scooter, is dying from a freak disease. The Scoot's final wish is that Nick and their quirky classmate, Jaycee Amato, deliver a prized first-edition copy of Of Mice and Men to the Scoot's father. There's just one problem: the Scoot's father walked out years ago and hasn't been heard from since. So, guided by Steinbeck's life lessons, and with only the vaguest of plans, Nick and Jaycee set off to find him. Characters you'll want to become friends with and a narrative voice that sparkles with wit make this a truly original coming-of-age story.

A Cure for Gravity

Author: Arthur Rosenfeld
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312874553
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Mercury Gant, a fleeing motorcyclist, and Umberto Santana, a bank robber with a pregnant girlfriend, meet in the middle of a tornado and "continue together along their road, learning about each other--and, more important, learning about themselves and the relationships with those they love, have loved. or will come to love."--Jacket.

Greenglow

Author: Ronald Evans
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784620238
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
This book describes an exciting, but unfinished scientific adventure story. It tells of the epic struggle by scientists to wrest the secrets from nature of how to control the force of electromagnetism and how to control aerodynamic forces. Control of the force of gravity has yet to be achieved. Analogies suggest where a breakthrough might be made. Greenglow & the search for gravity control follows the attempts mankind has made over the years to understand gravity as well as looking at more recent experiments to control it. The book is written by an engineer, who worked in the aerospace industry, and who persuaded BAE Systems to sponsor Project Greenglow, a small research programme aimed at investigating some ideas for controlling gravity. Based on analogies in nature, the book provides a road map for scientists, engineers and the general public who want to know more about gravity and our search to control it. Discovering nature’s secrets is an exciting, but unfinished story – there is much we still don’t know. The book describes the quest by scientists to gain control of gravity and electromagnetism, the two long-range forces of nature. Faraday discovered the secret of electromagnetic control. Newton began the search for gravity control, later continued by Einstein, but it eluded them. One day the secret will be discovered either by careful experimentation or, as is often the case, by stumbling across it by chance. In the future it is expected that gravity control will underpin a new method of propulsion and this book concludes with a look at some possible forms. Greenglow is a fascinating read for any aerospace engineers, physicists, experimental research scientists, science journalists, science historians, futurologists, UFO enthusiasts, Star Trekkies and general public interested in the breakthrough in understanding of how to control gravity.

The Novel Cure

Author: Ella Berthoud
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125931
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
"Delightful... elegant prose and discussions that span the history of 2,000 years of literature."—Publisher's Weekly A novel is a story transmitted from the novelist to the reader. It offers distraction, entertainment, and an opportunity to unwind or focus. But it can also be something more powerful—a way to learn about how to live. Read at the right moment in your life, a novel can—quite literally—change it. The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. To create this apothecary, the authors have trawled two thousand years of literature for novels that effectively promote happiness, health, and sanity, written by brilliant minds who knew what it meant to be human and wrote their life lessons into their fiction. Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Nervous about throwing a dinner party? Ali Smith’s There but for The will convince you that yours could never go that wrong. Whatever your condition, the prescription is simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals and in nice long chunks until you finish. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will offer solace, showing that you’re not the first to experience these emotions. The Novel Cure is also peppered with useful lists and sidebars recommending the best novels to read when you’re stuck in traffic or can’t fall asleep, the most important novels to read during every decade of life, and many more. Brilliant in concept and deeply satisfying in execution, The Novel Cure belongs on everyone’s bookshelf and in every medicine cabinet. It will make even the most well-read fiction aficionado pick up a novel he’s never heard of, and see familiar ones with new eyes. Mostly, it will reaffirm literature’s ability to distract and transport, to resonate and reassure, to change the way we see the world and our place in it. "This appealing and helpful read is guaranteed to double the length of a to-read list and become a go-to reference for those unsure of their reading identities or who are overwhelmed by the sheer number of books in the world."—Library Journal

The Gravity of Us

Author: Brittainy C. Cherry
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781545117439
Category : Man-woman relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Graham Russell and I weren't made for one another. I was driven by emotion; he was apathetic. I dreamed while he lived in nightmares. I cried when he had no tears to shed. Despite his frozen heart and my readiness to run, we sometimes shared seconds. Seconds when our eyes locked and we saw each other's secrets. Seconds when his lips tasted my fears, and I breathed in his pains. Seconds when we both imagined what it would be like to love one another. Those seconds left us floating, but when reality knocked us sideways, gravity forced us to descend. Graham Russell wasn't a man who knew how to love, and I wasn't a woman who knew how to either. Yet if I had the chance to fall again, I'd fall with him forever. Even if we were destined to crash against solid ground.

This Close to Happy

Author: Daphne Merkin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374711917
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
“A cleareyed, insightful account of how she felt during her nosedives into despair . . . shot through with a self-awareness that helps readers cheer her on.”—The New York Times A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of the Year “Despair is always described as dull,” writes Daphne Merkin, “when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.” This Close to Happy—Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression—captures this strange light. Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin portrays the lifelong arc of her affliction, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where she lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not “cured.” The opposite of depression, she writes with characteristic insight, is not a state of unimaginable happiness, but a state of relative all-right-ness. In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that is still often stigmatized and shrouded in misunderstanding. “[A] mesmerizing memoir.” —Booklist (starred review) “Brings a stunningly perceptive voice to the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.” —Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice

Selling Out

Author: Justina Robson
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1591028280
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Book two of the Quantum Gravity series sees Lila Black drawn into the intoxicatingly dangerous demon realm. Capricious, in love with beauty, demons are best left to themselves. This is not easy when they can't resist tampering with humans. Justina Robson's new series is a joyful melding of science fiction and fantasy brought together in the figure of the dangerously lovely Lila Black, a 21-year-old secret agent who's had much of her body replaced with weapon-and-armor-heavy intelligent metal and who isn't sure where her mind ends and her installed AI begins. Lila's world is one where demons, elves, and elementals live alongside people. And somehow Lila and the other agents of the security agency have to provide security for all and stay alive themselves.

Gravity Is the Thing

Author: Jaclyn Moriarty
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062883747
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
One of Real Simple’s Best Books of the Year “I loved this book. . . . Funny, heartbreaking and clever with a mystery at its heart.” —Jojo Moyes “With an eye as keen for human idiosyncrasies as Miranda July’s, and a sense of humor as bright and surprising as Maria Semple’s, this is a novel of pure velocity.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Twenty years ago, Abigail Sorenson’s brother Robert went missing one day before her sixteenth birthday, never to be seen again. That same year, she began receiving scattered chapters in the mail of a self-help manual, the Guidebook, whose anonymous author promised to make her life soar to heights beyond her wildest dreams. The Guidebook’s missives have remained a constant in Abi’s life—a befuddling yet oddly comforting voice through her family’s grief over her brother’s disappearance, a move across continents, the devastating dissolution of her marriage, and the new beginning as a single mother and café owner in Sydney. Now, two decades after receiving those first pages, Abi is invited to an all-expenses paid weekend retreat to learn “the truth” about the Guidebook. It’s an opportunity too intriguing to refuse. If Everything is Connected, then surely the twin mysteries of the Guidebook and a missing brother must be linked? What follows is completely the opposite of what Abi expected––but it will lead her on a journey of discovery that will change her life––and enchant readers. Gravity Is the Thing is a smart, unusual, wickedly funny novel about the search for happiness that will break your heart into a million pieces and put it back together, bigger and better than before.