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Ligero de equipaje: La vida de Antonio Machado
by Ian GibsonIan Gibson se centra en el personaje de Antonio Machado en esta biografía que no desdeña apuntes de crítica literaria. Como siempre, tan apasionado como bien documentado, Gibson retrata todos los rostros de Antonio Machado, poeta en tiempo de guerra. Antonio Machado (1875-1938) es uno de los poetas españoles más leídos y amados de todos los tiempos. Pero ¿cuál es su historia? ¿Cómo se forjó el carácter y la personalidad de esta figura capital de nuestra literatura? Ian Gibson se propone en este magnífico ensayo desgranar la vida del autor de Soledades (1903), Campos de Castilla (1912) y Juan de Mairena (1936) en un ejercicio intenso y a la vez ágil que repasa los hechos que marcaron su asombrosa trayectoria. Víctima de la guerra de España, Machado murió exiliado en Collioure, ligero, como siempre, de equipaje, pero portando el legado una obra irrepetible. Reseña:«Una biografía rigurosísimay de prosa muy ágil que solo puede escribir un ex jugador de rugby como es el genial irlandés -y español: tiene nuestra nacionalidad- Ian Gibson.»Ramón Irigoyen, El País
Light And Shade In War [Illustrated Edition]
by Noel Ross Captain Malcolm RossTwo Kiwis recount their experiences of the Front at Gallipoli and France during the First World War. Included are a number of their own photographs."THE authors of this book, father and son, have seen much of the Light and Shade of War during the past two years, the one as a War Correspondent in Egypt, Turkey and France, the other as a soldier, and, afterwards, as one of the staff of The Times."The day for writing the histories of our different campaigns is not yet. For the purposes of history delay is necessary, even though the gain in perspective may mean loss in colour. But there is a legitimate desire for the intimate and immediate impressions of the time, written down amid the ever-shifting scenes of the War itself. Such impressions will have some value now, and perhaps also in after years.Most of these sketches were written whilst the scenes and incidents they depict were fresh in the mind; some under fire. The proofs were corrected on the battlefield of the Somme in a tent over which British and German shells were passing at the time. While due allowance will be made for shortcomings owing to the circumstances under which the book was produced, the authors hope that no apology will be needed for presenting such pictures of the Light and Shade of War to the English-speaking World."
Light Blue Reign: How a City Slicker, a Quiet Kansan, and a Mountain Man Built College Basketball's Longest-Lasting Dynasty
by Art ChanskyLight Blue Reign tells inside story of how one of the most successful college basketball programs in the nation was builtThe 2009-10 NCAA college basketball season marked the 100th anniversary of North Carolina basketball. The UNC Tar Heels have won two NCAA championships since 2005, and own more victories over the last half-century than any other college team.But it wasn't always that way.For most of the first 50 years the team existed at UNC, the sport was an afterthought. That all changed in 1952 with the arrival of Frank McGuire. When Roy Williams and the Tar Heels won the 2005 and 2009 national championships, they could thank Frank McGuire and his protégé, Dean Smith, for starting the tradition of triumph. Art Chansky, who has covered UNC basketball for more than 30 years, constructs an intimate narrative of how three dramatically different coaches built the longest-lasting dynasty in college basketball.The banners of those teams hang in the rafters today, warming the hearts of all those who have worshipped UNC's Light Blue Reign over the last fifty years—and counting. Part history, part centennial celebration, Light Blue Reign is not simply about one team's victories—it's about the dedication, passion, and love for a sport that players and fans of any loyalty will understand.
Light Cavalry Outposts
by General Fortune de Brack Colonel L A Hale R. E. HaleGeneral De Brack served Napoleon and France for many years as a light cavalryman during the wars that raged for over a decade. He served under some of the most able and dashing of officers, including the legendary Lasalle and the celebrated Pajol. During this time, the skills and instincts of outpost duty were engraved on his mind, time-taught instincts long forgotten by the army in peace time. In his older age he was approached by the officers of his regiment to recount his advice, lessons and memoirs so that the invaluable experience could be passed on. In his book, Light Cavalry Outposts, General De Brack dispenses his maxims for service in the light cavalry interspersed with memories of his service under the eagles of Napoleon. Author -- General Fortune de Brack (1794-1854)Translator -- Colonel L A Hale, R.E. (d. 10.1914)Text taken, whole and complete, from the fourth edition published in London, W. Mitchell and Co, 1876.Original Page Count - xxii, 308 p.Illustrations -- 3 maps and plans.
Light In My Darkest Night
by Catherine MarshallThis is the story of the intense despair and spiritual emptiness that threatened Catherine Marshall's marriage, her health, and her life--and of the devastating discovery that ultimately brought her peace through a new and greater appreciation of God's love and will.
Light My Fire
by Ray Manzarek"The best book yet about The Doors." --Booklist Now available as an ebook for the first time...the inside story of the Doors, by cofounder and keyboard player Ray Manzarek. Includes 16 pages of photos. "A refreshingly candid read...a Doors bio worth opening." --Entertainment Weekly No other band has ever sounded quite like the Doors, and no other frontman has ever transfixed an audience quite the way Jim Morrison did. Ray Manzarek, the band's co-founder and keyboard player, was there from the very start--and until the sad dissolution--of the Doors. In this heartfelt and colorfully detailed memoir, complete with 16 pages of photographs, he brings us an insider's view of the brief, brilliant history...from the beginning to the end. "An engaging read." --Washington Post Book World
Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem
by Solly GanorForty-seven years after he was found half-dead in the snow, following a death march from Dachau, Solly Ganor again came face to face with his rescuer Clarence Matsumura at a reunion of Holocaust survivors and their American liberators. That meeting proved a catharsis, enabling Ganor to confront for the first time the catalogue of horrors he experienced during the Second World War. Beginning in prewar Lithuania, Light One Candle tells of the ominous changes that took place once Hitler came to power in 1933, of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul who wrote thousands of exit visas for Jews fleeing the Nazi onslaught, of the brutal conditions in the Kaunas ghetto where Ganor spent most of the war, and of Stutthoff and Dachau, the concentration camps he was shuttled to and from in the last, desperate days of the war. Unflinching in its depiction of evil but uplifting in its story of the survival of the human spirit, Light One Candle is a gripping memoir that waited fifty years to be told.
Light Our Fire: My Wedding to Jim Morrison
by Patricia Kennealy MorrisonWhat's it like to be married to the superstar lead singer of the Doors? Patricia Kennealy Morrison gives a loving and detailed account of the pagan handfasting ceremony that bound her forever with the legendary rock superstar Jim Morrison. The intimate portrait of Jim that emerges—a tender and vulnerable face that was shown to very few—makes this book essential reading. The reader has the good fortune of meeting Patricia in the process and empathizing with this smart, deeply spiritual professional woman who has fallen hopelessly in love with a young man whose genius has made him famous and whose demons have made him notorious.
Light This Candle: The Life and Times of Alan Shepard
by Neal ThompsonAlan Shepard was the brashest, cockiest, and most flamboyant of America's original Mercury Seven, but he was also regarded as the best. Intense, colorful, and dramatic, he was among the most private of America's public figures and, until his death in 1998, he guarded the story of his life zealously. Light This Candle, based on Neal Thompson's exclusive access to private papers and interviews with Shepard's family and closest friends--including John Glenn, Wally Schirra, and Gordon Cooper--offers a riveting, action-packed account of Shepard's life.
Light Years
by Caroline WoodwardIn 2007, Caroline Woodward was itching for a change. With an established career in book-selling and promotion, four books of her own and having raised a son with her husband, Jeff, she yearned for adventure and to re-ignite her passion for writing. Jeff was tired of piecing together low-paying part-time jobs and, with Caroline's encouragement, applied for a position as a relief lightkeeper on a remote North Pacific island. They endured lonely months of living apart, but the way of life rejuvenated Jeff and inspired Caroline to contemplate serious shifts in order to accompany him. When a permanent position for a lighthouse keeper became available, Caroline quit her job and joined Jeff on the lights. Caroline soon learned that the lighthouse-keeping life does not consist of long, empty hours in which to write. The reality is hard physical labour, long stretches of isolation and the constant threat of de-staffing. Beginning with a 3:30 a.m. weather report, the days are filled with maintaining the light station buildings, sea sampling, radio communication, beach cleanup, wildlife encounters and everything in between. As for dangerous rescue missions or dramatic shipwrecks--that kind of excitement is rare. "So far the only life I know I've saved is my own," she says, with her trademark dry wit. Yet Caroline is exhilarated by the scenic coastline with its drizzle and fog, seabirds and whales, and finds time to grow a garden and, as anticipated, write. Told with eloquent introspection and an eye for detail, Light Years is the personal account of a lighthouse keeper in twenty-first century British Columbia--an account that details Caroline's endurance of extreme climatic, interpersonal and medical challenges, as well as the practical and psychological aspects of living a happy, healthy, useful and creative life in isolation.
Light and Liberty: Reflections on the Pursuit of Happiness
by Thomas Jefferson Eric PetersenWere Thomas Jefferson alive to read this book, he would recognize every sentence, every elegant turn of phrase, every lofty, beautifully expressed idea. Indeed, every word in the book is his. In an astonishing feat of editing, Eric S. Petersen has culled the entirety of Thomas Jefferson's published works to fashion thirty-four original essays on themes ranging from patriotism and liberty to hope, humility, and gratitude. The result is a lucid, inspiring distillation of the wisdom of one of America's greatest political thinkers.From his personal motto--"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God"--to his resounding discourse on "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson defined the essential truth of the American spirit. In the essays that Petersen has crafted from letters, speeches, and public documents, Jefferson's unique moral philosophy and vision shine through. Among the hundreds of magnificent sentences gathered in this volume, here are Jefferson's pronouncements onGratitude: "I have but one system of ethics for men and for nations--to be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements and under all circumstances, to be open and generous."Religion: "A concern purely between our God and our consciences."America's national character: "It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate; to surmount every difficulty with resolution and contrivance."Public debt: "We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves."War: "I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind."In stately measured cadences, these thirty-four essays provide timeless guidance on leading a spiritually fulfilling life. Light and Liberty is a triumphant work of supreme eloquence, as uplifting today as when Jefferson first set these immortal sentences on paper.From the Hardcover edition.
Light and Shade
by Brad TolinskiMore than 30 years after disbanding in 1980, Led Zeppelin continues to be celebrated for its artistic achievements, broad musical influence, and commercial success. The band's notorious exploits have been chronicled in bestselling books such as Stephen Davis's Hammer of the Gods. Yet none of the individual members of the band has penned a memoir or cooperated to any degree with the press or a biographer. Iconic guitarist and Led Zeppelin founder, Jimmy Page, is both the band's most reticent member and the one who most fascinates its huge fanbase. For the first time and in his own words, he opens up to journalist Brad Tolinski, exploring in-depth his remarkable life and musical journey.
Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a Spy's Son: Updated Edition
by Mark ColvinLight and Shadow is the incredible story of a father waging a secret war against communism during the Cold War, while his son comes of age as a journalist and embarks on the risky career of a foreign correspondent. Mark covered local and global events for the ABC for more than four decades, reporting on wars, royal weddings and everything in between. In the midst of all this he discovered that his father was an MI6 spy. Mark was witness to some of the most significant international events, including the Iranian hostage crisis, the buildup to the first Gulf War in Iraq and the direct aftermath of the shocking genocide in Rwanda. But when he contracted a life-threatening illness while working in the field, his world changed forever. Mark Colvin's engrossing memoir takes you inside the coverage of major news events and navigates the complexity of his father's double life. Light and Shadow was published seven months before Mark's death, and he had the pleasure of seeing it become a bestseller. Award-winning ABC journalist Tony Jones pays tribute to his friend in an afterword.
Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris's Life and Work
by Peter LariseyLawren Stewart Harris’ artistic career began in the first decade of our century. Well known for the nationalist-inspired landscapes that he painted between 1908 and 1932, Harris turned resolutely in 1934 to the painting of abstractions. He continued to create works that reflected his own modernist and mystical developments until the end of his life. Canadians praise Harris’ landscapes and admire him as a planner of innovative and heroic-sounding sketching trips into the North. He is also recognized as the chief organizer of the Group of Seven. A long list of younger artists he considered creative greatly benefited from Harris’ encouragement and often generous, practical help; many of them have been interviewed for this book. In the lives of some Canadians harris still functions as a gurulike guide – a role he was quite content to take on during his own lifetime – because of the spiritual content of his art and aesthetic writings and the example of his optimistic, vigorous and apparently untroubled life. But Harris’ was not an untroubled life, and Light for a Cold Land examines his personal crises and difficulties, some of which caused important changes in his art. The book also uncovers the painting styles, artistic tensions and cultural dynamics of the German milieu in which Harris received his only formal art education. His student years in Berlin profoundly influenced not only his art but also his artistic politics and his philosophy. It is ironic that in the art of this most articulate of Canadian nationalist painters, there are extensive German influences. Light for a Cold Land is the first art-historical study of Lawren Harris that attempts to explore his life and all aspects of his career. It is based on extensive work in archives, libraries, public art galleries and private collections in Canada, as well as research in Germany and interviews with members of Harris’ family and many of his friends, acquaintances, colleagues and critics.
Light from Heaven
by Christmas Carol KauffmanJoseph Armstrong's father showed more concern for his farms and horses than he did for his wife and children. Work was first. Mishaps were dealt with harshly. Praise was a foreign language. The family suffered cruel scorn, rejection, and deprivation. All the while, Bennet Armstrong hypocritically portrayed himself to others as flawlessly pious. The Armstrong home was a potential hotbed for bitterness and emotional desolation. Thankfully, a devout mother bridged the gap, loving her children, praying fervently for their safety and salvation. Annie Armstrong's prayers were heard. Joseph came to trust his kind heavenly Father who helped him love and forgive and rise above his circumstance to a life of purpose and peace. This story, sometimes heartrending sometimes heartening points to the one true hope for all man's miseries, Jesus Christ, the true Light From Heaven.
Light in Bandaged Places: Healing in the Wake of Young Betrayal
by Liz KinchenLight in Bandaged Places shows us the harm done when an older man in a position of power convinces a child that sex with him is alright because he loves her. This poignant story takes us through the long-term wounding of such abuse—and the multifaceted path of healing.As a lonely girl coming of age in the 1970s, Liz has every reason to believe her 8th-grade teacher is in love with her. Because the sex isn&’t physically violent and is wrapped in a message of love, she learns to exchange sex for attention. It feels like love, after all. But years later, as an adult, emotional closeness eludes Liz. Even after marrying a sensitive, caring man, she is walled off. Struggling through confusing years, she believes something is deeply wrong with her. Healing begins when an unexpected event takes Liz back to those formative years, and she sees for the first time that what happened to her was not love but trauma. As she begins to understand how her relationship with her former teacher destroyed her innocence and self-worth, she begins a spiritual and psychological journey that sets her free.Now a meditation teacher and Buddhist practitioner, Liz offers her story in hope of helping others along their own paths of discovery and healing.
Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us
by Heino Falcke Jörg RömerAn astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoir.On April 10, 2019, award-winning astrophysicist Heino Falcke presented the first image ever captured of a black hole at an international press conference—a turning point in astronomy that Science magazine called the scientific breakthrough of the year. That photo was captured with the unthinkable commitment of an intercontinental team of astronomers who transformed the world into a global telescope. While this image achieved Falcke’s goal in making a black hole “visible” for the first time, he recognizes that the photo itself asks more questions for humanity than it answers.Light in the Darkness takes us on Falcke’s extraordinary journey to the darkest corners of the universe. From the first humans looking up at the night sky to modern astrophysics, from the study of black holes to the still-unsolved mysteries of the universe, Falcke asks, in even the greatest triumphs of science, is there room for doubts, faith, and a God? A plea for curiosity and humility, Light in the Darkness sees one of the great minds shaping the world today as he ponders the big, pressing questions that present themselves when we look up at the stars.
Light of the Feather: A Teacher's Journey into Native American Classrooms and Culture
by Mick FedulloChronicles Fedullo's unique journey into the heart of contemporary Native America, describing how one white man crossed the cultural divide to discover, among his Native American students, old and new values, the determination of the human spirit, and, ultimately, himself.
Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis
by Gabrielle SelzThe first in-depth biography of Sam Francis, the legendary American abstract painter who broke all the rules in his personal and artistic life.Light on Fire is the first comprehensive biography of Sam Francis, one of the most important American abstract artists of the twentieth century. Based on Gabrielle Selz’s unprecedented access to Francis’s files, as well as private correspondence and hundreds of interviews, this book traces the extraordinary and ultimately tragic journey of a complex and charismatic artist who first learned to paint as a former air-corps pilot encased for three years in a full-body cast. While still a young man, Francis saw his color-saturated paintings fetch the highest prices of any living artist. His restless desire resulted in five marriages and homes on three continents; his entrepreneurial spirit led to founding a museum, a publishing company, a reforestation program and several nonprofits. Light on Fire captures the art, life, personality, and talent of a man whom the art historian and museum director William C. Agee described as a rare artist participating in the "visionary reconstruction of art history," defying creative boundaries among the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. With settings from World War II San Francisco to postwar Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, Selz crafts an intimate portrait of a man who sought to resolve in art the contradictions he couldn’t resolve in life.
Light on Lucrezia (Lucrezia Borgia #2)
by Jean PlaidySome said she was an elegant seductress. Others swore she was an incestuous murderess. It didn't matter what they called her. She was the most dangerous and sought-after woman in all of Rome. She was Lucrezia Borgia. Born into Rome's notorious Borgia family, young Lucrezia led a life colored by violence and betrayal. Now, married for the second time at just eighteen, she hopes for happiness with her handsome husband, Alfonso. But faced with brutal murder, she's soon torn between her love for her husband and her devotion to her brother Cesare. And in the days when the Borgias ruled Italy, no one was safe from the long arm of their power. Even Lucrezia. In this compelling story of a beautiful woman caught up in a tortuous web of fear and love, Jean Plaidy sheds light on the much maligned Lucrezia and vividly brings her to life.
Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero - The Tragic Life of Robert E. Lee's Father
by Ryan Cole"Light-Horse Harry blazes across the pages of Ryan Cole's narrative like a meteor—and his final crash is as destructive. Cole tells his story with care, sympathy, and where necessary, sternness. This book is a great, and sometimes harrowing read." —Richard Brookhiser, senior editor at National Review and author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington Who was "Light-Horse Harry" Lee? Gallant Revolutionary War hero. Quintessential Virginia cavalryman. George Washington’s trusted subordinate and immortal eulogist. Robert E. Lee’s beloved father. Founding father who shepherded the Constitution through the Virginia Ratifying Convention. But Light-Horse Harry Lee was also a con man. A beachcomber. Imprisoned for debt. Caught up in sordid squabbles over squalid land deals. Maimed for life by an angry political mob. Light-Horse Harry Lee’s life was tragic, glorious, and dramatic, but perhaps because of its sad, ignominious conclusion historians have rarely given him his due—until now. Now historian Ryan Cole presents this soldier and statesman of the founding generation with all the vim and vigor that typified Lee himself. Scouring hundreds of contemporary documents and reading his way into Lee’s life, political philosophy, and character, Cole gives us the most intimate picture to date of this greatly awed but hugely talented man whose influence has reverberated from the founding of the United States to the present day.
Lighter Than Air: The Life and Times of Wing Commander N.F. Usborne RN, Pioneer of Naval Aviation
by Guy WarnerNeville Florian Usborne entered the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1897. In the years between him joining up and the outbreak of the First World War, he engaged in a huge number of enterprises and endeavours. Praise and respect garnered in accordance with his achievements all helped to establish his reputation in later years as an 'irreplaceable' pioneer and a leading light of early British airship design. His fertile imagination and enterprising spirit fused to form a dynamic personality, able in wartime to draw up countless schemes in an effort to outwit the enemy. His chief task during the Great War was to dream up new tactics and designs to combat the Zeppelin menace, perceived as one of the most damaging threats of the entire conflict. He was also deeply involved in the design of the very successful SS and Coastal Class airships; indeed, during 1915 he was actually appointed Inspector Commander of Airships at the Admiralty. Unfortunately, his illustrious career was destined to be cut short in 1916 when he was killed testing a prototype of one of his own designs. This new biography seeks to shine a light on an overlooked pioneer of early aviation and it does so in entertaining and reverential style. The importance of Usborne the pioneer is made plain; as one of his contemporaries commented upon his death No one can talk of the early days of British airship design without mention of his name and work. A personality was lost on that February day which was irreplaceable.
Lightfoot
by Nicholas JenningsThe definitive, full-access story of the life and songs of Canada's legendary troubadourGordon Lightfoot’s name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness. His music defined the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and ‘70s, topped charts and sold millions. He is unquestionably Canada’s greatest songwriter, and an international star who has performed on the world’s biggest stages. While Lightfoot’s songs are well known, the man behind them is elusive. He’s never allowed his life to be chronicled in a book—until now.Biographer Nick Jennings has had unprecedented access to the notoriously reticent musician. Lightfoot takes us deep inside the artist’s world, from his idyllic childhood in Orillia, the wild sixties, and his canoe trips into Canada’s North to his heady times atop the music world. Jennings explores the toll that success took on his personal life—including his troubled relationships, his battle with alcohol and his near-death experiences—and the extraordinary drive and tenacity that pulled him through it all.Rich in voices from fellow musicians, close friends, Lightfoot’s family and the singer’s own reminiscences, the biography tells the stories behind some of his best-known love songs, including “Beautiful” and “Song for a Winter’s Night,” as well as the infidelity and divorce that resulted in classics like “Sundown” and “If You Could Read My Mind.” Kris Kristofferson has called Lightfoot’s songs “some of the most beautiful and lasting music of our time.” Lightfoot is an unforgettable portrait of a treasured singer-songwriter, an artist whose work has been covered by everyone from Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand and Nico to Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Gord Downie. Revealing and insightful, Lightfoot is both an inspiring story of redemption and an exhilarating read.
Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain
by Roy Jr. MorrisIn the very last paragraph of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it's time "to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest." Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally is trying to "sivilize" him, and Huck Finn can't stand it--he's been there before. It's a decision Huck's creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn't even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, "That ain't no matter." With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion's offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war. A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America's best-loved, most influential writer. The "trouble," as he famously promised, had begun. With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain's life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction--never an easy task when dealing with Twain--to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away. With the frequent help of Twain's own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America's most famous and beloved writer. It's a good story, and mostly true--with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.
Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except Sex
by Susan ShapiroIn the critically acclaimed Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Manhattan journalist Susan Shapiro revisited five self-destructive romances. In her hilarious, illuminating new memoir, Lighting Up, she rejects five self-destructive substances. This difficult quest for clean living starts with Shapiro's shocking revelation that, at forty, her lengthiest, most emotionally satisfying relationship has been with cigarettes. A two-pack-a-day smoker since the age of thirteen, Susan Shapiro quickly discovers that it's impossible to be a writer, a nonsmoker, sane, and slender in the same year. The last time she tried to quit, she gained twenty-three pounds, couldn't concentrate on work, and wanted to kill herself and her husband, Aaron, a TV comedy writer who hates her penchant for puffing away. Yet just as she's about to choose her vice over her marriage vows, she stumbles upon a secret weapon. Dr. Winters, "the James Bond of psychotherapy," is a brilliant but unorthodox addiction specialist, a former chain-smoker himself. Working his weird magic on her psyche, he unravels the roots of her twenty-seven-year compulsion, the same dangerous dependency that has haunted her doctor father, her grandfather, and a pair of eccentric aunts from opposite sides of the family, along with Freud and nearly one in four Americans. Dr. Winters teaches her how to embrace suffering, then proclaims that her months of panic, depression, insecurity, vulnerability, and wild mood swings win her the award for "the worst nicotine withdrawal in the history of the world." Shapiro finally does kick the habit--while losing weight and finding career and connubial bliss--only to discover that the second she's let go of her long-term crutch, she's already replaced it with another fixation. After banishing cigarettes, alcohol, dope, gum, and bread from her day-to-day existence, she conquers all her demons and survives deprivation overload. But relying religiously on Dr. Winters, she soon realizes that the only obsession she has left to quit is him. Never has the battle to stem substance abuse been captured with such wit, sophisticated insight, and candor. Lighting Up is so compulsively readable, it's addictive.