We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

Author: Tom Phelan
Publisher: Gallery Books
ISBN: 150119710X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
“You don’t have to be Irish to cherish this literary gift—just being human and curious and from a family will suffice.” —Malachy McCourt, New York Times bestselling author of A Monk Swimming In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. Tom Phelan, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish midlands, spent his formative years working with his wise and demanding father as he sought to wrest a livelihood from a farm that was often wet, muddy, and back-breaking. It was a time before rural electrification, the telephone, and indoor plumbing; a time when the main modes of travel were bicycle and animal cart; a time when small farmers struggled to survive and turkey eggs were hatched in the kitchen cupboard; a time when the Church exerted enormous control over Ireland. We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It recounts Tom’s upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life’s adversities.

We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It

Author: Tom Phelan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501197118
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich

Author: Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673983X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
A “thought-provoking” one-volume distillation of the author’s powerful trilogy in praise of the middle class’s role in creating a better, and richer, world (Library Journal). The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith’s puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism. For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Art Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement. Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey’s influential explanation of how we got rich. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, this book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought. Praise for the Bourgeois Era Trilogy “A contender for the great book of our age.” —The Times, Book of the Week “Persuasive . . . richly detailed and erudite.” —Financial Times

We Are Rich

Author: Dori Carter
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590513290
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
The little, leafy town of Rancho Esperanza has been a perfect place to live for over a century–a bastion of good, solid, Anglo-Saxon, Republican money. These founding fathers built their gracious estates and country club and fondly called their town, “Ohio by the Sea.” There was only one traffic light and time seemed to stop at the freeway off ramp. Then came the Clinton years and the invasion of the New American Ruling Class: New York hedge fund managers, Hollywood producers, and Silicon Valley billionaires. Almost overnight, real estate prices quadruple, horse pastures vanish, tuna tartare and arugula appear on every menu, and a Democratic congresswoman is elected by a landslide. The Old Guard aristocrats of yesterday are now irrelevant and the only power they have is keeping the Kornblatts out of their country club. Twelve characters with distinctly different voices tell their tales of lust and longing spanning the years from World War II to the present–each story a piece of the jigsaw puzzle. The pieces all fit together until the secrets and lies, guarded for generations, are revealed, changing everything we thought was true about Rancho Esperanza and the people who live there. Written as a novel in stories, Dori Carter’s social satire gets into the hearts and souls of her characters, and presents a fresh look at our attitudes toward money and the ever-shifting nature of status in America.

A Monk Swimming

Author: Malachy McCourt
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504093445
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
In this darkly humorous New York Times–bestselling memoir, the Irish American writer and actor shares charming stories from his first decade in the US. Malachy McCourt left behind a childhood of poverty and painful memories of his father and mother in Limerick, Ireland, when he followed his brother, Frank, to America in 1952. In A Monk Swimming, McCourt recounts the decade that followed. With not much else to his name other than his sharp wit and knack for storytelling, McCourt was unsure what he would do after arriving in New York City. He worked as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks, became the first celebrity bartender in a Manhattan saloon, performed on stage with the Irish Players, and told tales to Jack Paar on The Tonight Show. Although McCourt gained success, money, women, and, eventually, children of his own, he still carried memories of the past with him. So, he fled again. He found himself in the Manhattan Detention Complex, otherwise known as the Tombs. He was arrested several times: poolside in Beverly Hills, in Zurich with gold-smugglers, and again in Calcutta with sex workers. McCourt’s journey also took him to Paris, Rome, and even Limerick again, until finally he was forced to grapple with his past. Praise for A Monk Swimming “[A] funny, oddly winning book.” —The New York Times “A rollicking good read that, as the Irish say, would make a dead man laugh.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Malachy McCourt, who has habitually regurgitated English in glorious colors to his fellow Irishmen and New Yorkers, here makes his vivid, whimsical, raucous, murderous joy and voice available to the rest of us in tales of riot and glory which build on the story of the McCourts’ early life so dazzlingly told in Angela’s Ashes by his brother Frank.” —Thomas Keneally, author of the international bestseller Schindler’s List

This Is Not My Memoir

Author: André Gregory
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374713278
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
The autobiography-of-sorts of André Gregory, an iconic figure in American theater and the star of My Dinner with André This is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theatre director, writer, and actor. For the first time, Gregory shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This is Not My Memoir includes fantastic and fantastical stories that take the reader from wartime Paris to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde theaters to monasteries in India. Along the way we meet Jerzy Grotowski, Helene Weigel, Gregory Peck, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, Wallace Shawn, and many other larger-than-life personalities. This is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between Gregory and Todd London who create a portrait of an artist confronting his later years. Here, too, are the reflections of a man who only recently learned how to love. What does it mean to create art in a world that often places little value on the process of creating it? And what does it mean to confront the process of aging when your greatest work of art may well be your own life?

My Father's Wake

Author: Kevin Toolis
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306921456
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
An intimate, lyrical look at the ancient rite of the Irish wake--and the Irish way of overcoming our fear of death Death is a whisper for most of us. Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, pull the curtains, and speak softly. But on a remote island off the coast of Ireland's County Mayo, death has a louder voice. Each day, along with reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local radio runs a daily roll call of the recently departed. The islanders go in great numbers, young and old alike, to be with their dead. They keep vigil with the corpse and the bereaved company through the long hours of the night. They dig the grave with their own hands and carry the coffin on their own shoulders. The islanders cherish the dead--and amid the sorrow, they celebrate life, too. In My Father's Wake, acclaimed author and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Toolis unforgettably describes his own father's wake and explores the wider history and significance of this ancient and eternal Irish ritual. Perhaps we, too, can all find a better way to deal with our mortality -- by living and loving as the Irish do.

Stop Acting Rich

Author: Thomas J. Stanley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118011570
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
The bestselling author of The Millionaire Next Door reveals easy ways to build real wealth With well over two million of his books sold, and huge praise from many media outlets, Dr. Thomas J. Stanley is a recognized and highly respected authority on how the wealthy act and think. Now, in Stop Acting Rich ? and Start Living Like a Millionaire, he details how the less affluent have fallen into the elite luxury brand trap that keeps them from acquiring wealth and details how to get out of it by emulating the working rich as opposed to the super elite. Puts wealth in perspective and shows you how to live rich without spending more Details why we spend lavishly and how to stop this destructive cycle Discusses how being "rich" means more than just big houses and luxury cars A defensive strategy for tough times, Stop Acting Rich shows readers how to live a rich, happy life through accumulating more wealth and using it to achieve the type of financial freedom that will create true happiness and fulfillment.

Once We Were Sisters

Author: Sheila Kohler
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143129295
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
ONE OF PEOPLE MAGAZINE’S BEST NEW BOOKS “A searing and intimate memoir about love turned deadly.” —The BBC “An intimate illumination of sisterhood and loss.” —People When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned by the news, she immediately flew back to the country where she was born, determined to find answers and forced to reckon with his history of violence and the lingering effects of their most unusual childhood—one marked by death and the misguided love of their mother. In her signature spare and incisive prose, Sheila Kohler recounts the lives she and her sister led. Flashing back to their storybook childhood at the family estate, Crossways, Kohler tells of the death of her father when she and Maxine were girls, which led to the family abandoning their house and the girls being raised by their mother, at turns distant and suffocating. We follow them to the cloistered Anglican boarding school where they first learn of separation and later their studies in Rome and Paris where they plan grand lives for themselves—lives that are interrupted when both marry young and discover they have made poor choices. Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death. “A beautiful and disturbing memoir of a beloved sister who died at the age of thirty-nine in circumstances that strongly suggest murder. . . . Highly recommended.” —Joyce Carol Oates

Today We are Rich

Author: Tim Sanders
Publisher: Tyndale House Pub
ISBN: 9781414339115
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
What makes our lives rich, argues Sanders, "New York Times-"bestselling author, international speaker, and former Yahoo! executive, isn't money. It's having total confidence--confidence in God, in one's team, and in one's self.