|
Biography and Memoir April 2024
|
|
|
|
| The Darkest White: A Mountain Legend and the Avalanche That Took Him by Eric BlehmIn this sterling tribute to a talent gone too soon, bestselling biographer Eric Blehm chronicles the life of trailblazing snowboarder Craig Kelly, who died during the 2003 Durrand Glacier avalanche in British Columbia. This is the story of Craig Kelly's life, a heartbreaking but extraordinary and inspiring odyssey of a latchkey kid whose athletic prowess and innovations would revolutionize winter sports, take him around the globe, and push him into ever more extreme environments that would ultimately take his life. It is also a definitive, immersive account of snowboarding and the cultural movement that exploded around it, growing the sport from minor Gen X cult hobby to Olympic centerpiece and a billion-dollar business full of feuds and rivalries. Finally, this is a mesmerizing, cautionary portrait of the mountains, of the allure and the glory they offer, and of the avalanches they unleash with unforgiving fury. |
|
|
Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe
by Robert Morgan
Over 170 years after the death of author Edgar Allan Poe, an acclaimed novelist and poet offers a new biography of this gifted, complicated figure who continues to invite enduring fascination and speculation for readers, scholars, and devotees of the weird and macabre. Focusing on Poe's personal relationships, Morgan chronicles how several women influenced his life and art. Eliza Poe, his mother, died before he turned three, but she haunted him ever after. The loss of Elmira Royster Shelton, his first and last love, devastated him and inspired much of his poetry. Morgan shows that Poe, known for his gothic and supernatural writing, was also a poet of the natural world who helped invent the detective story, science fiction, analytical criticism, and symbolist aesthetics. Though he died at age forty, Poe left behind works of great originality and vision that Fallen Angel explores with depth and feeling.
|
|
|
Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson
by James Marcus
More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure, who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness. This Emerson is a rebel. He is also a lover, a friend, a husband, and a father. Having declared his great topic to be "the infinitude of the private man," he is nonetheless an intensely social being, who develops Transcendentalism. And although he resists political activism early on-hoping instead for a revolution in consciousness-the burning issue of slavery ultimately transforms him from cloistered metaphysician to fiery abolitionist. Drawing on telling episodes from Emerson's life alongside landmark essays like Self-Reliance, Experience, and Circles, Glad to the Brink of Fear reveals how Emerson shares our preoccupations with fate and freedom, race and inequality, love and grief. It shows, too, how his desire to see the world afresh, rather than accepting the consensus view, is a lesson that never grows old.
|
|
| Sharing Too Much: Musings from an Unlikely Life by Richard Paul EvansBefore he was the #1 New York Times bestselling author of holiday classics such as The Christmas Box, Richard Paul Evans was a young boy being raised by a suicidal mother and dealing with relentless bullying. He could not fathom what the future held for him. Now, in this intimate and heartfelt collection of personal essays, Evans shares his moving journey from childhood to beloved author. With his signature seasoned finesse he offers the insightful lessons he's learned and engaging advice about everything from marriage to parenthood and even facing near-death experiences. This is a charming essay collection that is the perfect gift all year round. |
|
| Grief is For People by Sloane CrosleyDisarmingly witty and poignant, Sloane Crosley's memoir explores multiple kinds of losses. How do we live without the ones we love? After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief. For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, Sloane's apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place. When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels Sloane on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll of the pandemic. Sloane Crosley's search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with resounding empathy. |
|
|
Rebel Rising
by Rebel Wilson
Chronicling the emotional and physical lessons she's learned as well as her most embarrassing experiences, the scene-stealing actress, writing about the most personal and important moments in her life, from fertility issues and weight gain and loss to rejections, shows us how to love ourselves while making us laugh uncontrollably.
|
|
|
Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah
by Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time. Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632-1677) was a radical free thinker who led a life guided by strong moral principles despite his disbelief in an all-seeing God. Seen by many-Christians as well as Jews- as Satan's disciple during his lifetime, Spinoza has been regarded as a secular saint since his death. Many contradictory beliefs have been attached to his name: rationalism or metaphysics, atheism or pantheism, liberalism or despotism, Jewishness or anti-Semitism. However, there is no question that he viewed freedom of thought and speech as essential to an open and free society. In this insightful account, the author stresses the importance of the time and place that shaped Spinoza, beginning with the Sephardim of Amsterdam and followed by the politics of the Dutch Republic. Though Spinoza rejected the basic assumptions of his family's faith, and was consequently expelled from his Sephardic community, Buruma argues that Spinoza did indeed lead a Jewish life: a modern Jewish life. To Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others today, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without believing in Judaism. His defense of universal freedom is as important for our own time as it was in his.
|
|
|
Carson McCullers: A Life
by Mary V. Dearborn
This new biography of the brilliant Southern author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is based on newly available letters and journals and traces how she captured the heart and longing of the outcast.
|
|
Contact your librarian for more great books!
|
|
|
Michigan City Public Library 100 E. 4th Street Michigan City, Indiana 46360 219-873-3044mclib.org/ |
|
|
|