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Biography and Memoir February 2019
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The songaminute man : how music bought my father home again
by Simon McDermott
When Simon McDermott first noticed his dad Ted's sudden flares of temper and fits of forgetfulness, he couldn't have guessed what lay ahead. Then came the devastating, inevitable diagnosis. As Ted retreated into his own world, Simon and his mum Linda desperately tried to reach him until at last: an idea. Turning the ignition in his mum's little runaround, Simon hit play on Ted's favourite song Quando Quando Quando. And like that, they were just two mates driving around Blackburn, singing at the top of their lungs.That's when he made a decision. His Dad - the storyteller of his childhood and his best friend - couldn't tell his own story, so Simon would tell it for him. This is that story.
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Anything that burns you : a portrait of Lola Ridge, radical poet
by Terese Svoboda
Terese Svoboda takes the reader on a fascinating journey from Lola Ridge's childhood as a newly arrived Irish immigrant in the grim mining towns of New Zealand to her years as a budding poet and artist in Sydney, to her migration to America and the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. At one time considered one of the most popular poets of her day, she later fell out of critical favor due to her realistic and impassioned verse that looked head on at the major social woes of society. Moreover, her work and appearances alongside the likes of Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Will Durant, and other socialists and radicals put her in the line of fire not only of the police and government, but also the literary pundits who criticized her activism as being excessive and melodramatic.
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Ditch the dead weight : how my toughest choice became my greatest mission
by Mike Rolls
Mike Rolls was a sports-mad teenager when he contracted a deadly disease on a football trip. Overnight he was fighting for his life. When Mike regained consciousness, he had lost his right leg, half his left foot, two fingers and part of his nose, and had extensive internal injuries. His parents were told he had a five per cent chance of survival. After a painfully slow recovery and eight years of living with a leg that would never heal, Mike made the extraordinarily difficult decision to have his remaining leg amputated. More than just a triumph-over-adversity story, Mike's Ditch the Dead Weight combines personal experience with proven scientific research and a practical methodology for letting go of anything that no longer serves you.
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The wife's tale : a personal history
by Ada Edemariam
A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children. The Wife's Tale is an intimate memoir, both of a life and of a country.
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Bodacious the shepherd cat : a charming tale of an extraordinary cat
by Suzanna Crampton
Written from the perspective of Bodacious the cat, this is a memoir of Bodacious's life on the farm and everything that entails, early mornings, frosty starts, beautiful sunrises, adventurous rare-breed Zwartbles sheep, hard work, entertaining animals, mouth-watering food, kind people and idyllic country living with its highs and lows. The Shepherd often tells Bodacious her favourite story of how she went out to buy red ribbon to wrap a gift for her friend, but instead came home with a daring, assertive, ambitious cat looking for a home. But soon The Shepherd realises she needs Bodacious as much as he needs her. As soon as he arrives, Bodacious saunters around the farm like he owns the place and immediately establishes himself as Top Cat. But Bodacious isn't content to pad round the house and curl up by the Aga, and soon he befriends a farm cat called Oscar who trains him in the ways of the farm. As well as Oscar, Bodacious gets to know all the other animals on the farm - cats Miss Marley and Ovenmitt, the scruffy border collie/fox terrier-cross called Pepper, and The Big Fellow, to name a few.
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A Letter from Paris : A True Story of Hidden Art, Lost Romance, and Family Reclaimed
by Louisa Deasey
When Louisa Deasey receives a message from a Frenchwoman called Coralie, who has found a cache of letters in an attic, written about Louisa's father, neither woman can imagine the events it will set in motion. The letters, dated 1949, detail a passionate affair between Louisa's father, Denison, and Coralie's grandmother, Michelle, in post-war London. They spark Louisa to find out more about her father, who died when she was six. From the seemingly simple question Who was Denison Deasey? follows a trail of discovery that leads Louisa to the libraries of Melbourne and the streets of London, to the cafes and restaurants of Paris and a poet's villa in the south of France.
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| Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee by Wayne FlyntThe violent racism of the American South drove Wayne Flynt away from his home state of Alabama, but the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's classic novel about courage, community and equality, inspired him to return in the early 1960s and craft a career documenting and teaching Alabama history. Flynt and Nelle Harper Lee began writing to one other while she was living in New York - heartfelt, insightful and humorous letters in which they swapped stories, information and opinions on topics both personal and professional: their families, books, Alabama history and social values, health concerns, and even their fears and accomplishments.Beautifully written, intelligent and telling, this remarkable compendium of their letters - a correspondence that lasted for a quarter century, from 1992 until Harper Lee's death in February 2016 - offers an incisive and compelling look into the mind, heart and work of one of the most beloved authors in modern literary history. |
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George Washington : a life in books
by Kevin J Hayes
Based on an exhaustive amount of research at the Library of Congress, the collections at Mount Vernon, and rare book archives scattered across the country, Kevin J. Hayes draws on juvenilia, letters, diaries, pamphlets, and the close to 1,000 books owned by Washington to reconstruct the active intellectual life that has gone largely unnoticed in conventional narratives of the first US president. Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt a sense of acute embarrassment about his relative lack of formal education and cultural sophistication, and in this lively literary biography, Hayes reconstructs how Washington worked tirelessly to improve his mind. Beginning with the primers, forgotten periodicals, conduct books, and classic eighteenth-century novels such as Tom Jones that shaped Washington's early life, Hayes engages with Washington's letters and journals, charting the many ways the books of his upbringing affected decisions before and during the Revolutionary War.
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| Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home by Nina StibbeLove, Nina: Despatches from Family Life by Nina Stibbe is the laugh-out-loud story of the trials and tribulations of a very particular family. In 1982 Nina Stibbe, a 20-year-old from Leicester, moved to London to work as a nanny for a very particular family. It was a perfect match: Nina had no idea how to cook, look after children or who the weirdos were who called round. And the family, busy discussing such arcane subjects as how to swear in German or the merits (or otherwise) of turkey mince, were delighted by her lack of skills. Love, Nina is the collection of letters she wrote home gloriously describing her 'domestic' life, the unpredictable houseguests and the cat everyone loved to hate. |
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