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Two Hitlers and a Marilyn: An autograph hunter's escape from suburbia
by Adam Andrusier"I'd managed to puncture a hole between our universe and the parallel one where all the celebrities lived."'The zaniest book I've read in eons. Andrusier is a fresh new voice and more importantly he's funny as hell.'GARY SHTEYNGARTAdam Andrusier spent his childhood in pursuit of autographs. After writing to every famous person he could think of, from Frank Sinatra to Colonel Gaddafi, he soon jostled with the paparazzi at stage doors and came face-to-face with the most famous people on the planet.For young Adam, autographs were a backstage pass to a world beyond his chaotic family home in Pinner, and his Holocaust-obsessed father. They provided a special connection to a world of glamour and significance lying just beyond his reach.But as Adam turned from collector to dealer, learning how to spot a fake from the real deal, he discovered that in life, as in autographs, not everything is as it first appears. When your obsession is a search for the authentic, what happens when you discover fraudulence in your own family?Two Hitlers and a Marilyn is a hilarious and moving account of discovering that idols are mortals. It's a story of growing up, forgiveness and discovering a place in the world.'I love this book. It is wise, funny, surprising, touching, and wonderful company.'JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER(P)2021 Headline Publishing Group Limited
Two Hitlers and a Marilyn: An autograph hunter's escape from suburbia
by Adam Andrusier"I'd managed to puncture a hole between our universe and the parallel one where all the celebrities lived."'The zaniest book I've read in eons. Andrusier is a fresh new voice and more importantly he's funny as hell.' GARY SHTEYNGART Adam Andrusier spent his childhood in pursuit of autographs. After writing to every famous person he could think of, from Frank Sinatra to Colonel Gaddafi, he soon jostled with the paparazzi at stage doors and came face-to-face with the most famous people on the planet. For young Adam, autographs were a backstage pass to a world beyond his chaotic family home in Pinner, and his Holocaust-obsessed father. They provided a special connection to a world of glamour and significance lying just beyond his reach. But as Adam turned from collector to dealer, learning how to spot a fake from the real deal, he discovered that in life, as in autographs, not everything is as it first appears. When your obsession is a search for the authentic, what happens when you discover fraudulence in your own family? Two Hitlers and a Marilyn is a hilarious and moving account of discovering that idols are mortals. It's a story of growing up, forgiveness and discovering a place in the world.'I love this book. It is wise, funny, surprising, touching, and wonderful company.' JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
The Two-In-One: Walking With Smokie, Walking With Blindness
by Rod MichalkoWhen Rod Michalko's sight finally became so limited that he no longer felt safe on busy city streets, he began to search for a guide.
Two in the Bush
by Gerald DurrellWhat Durrell sees down under are some species that have chalked their own path of evolution and are much different from wildlife in the bigger continents.
The Two Isabellas of King John
by Kristen McQuinnKing John of England was married to two women: Isabella of Gloucester and Isabelle of Angoulême. The two women were central to shaping John and his reign, each in her own way molding the king and each other over their lives. Little is known about Isabella of Gloucester and she has largely become an historical footnote; Isabelle of Angoulême has a reputation as a witch and poisoner. However, both were products of their time, victims and pawns of the powerful men whose voices overwrote the experiences of women. By examining these two very different women through a modern feminist lens, The Two Isabellas offers new insight into one of England’s lesser-known queens and a different interpretation of one of its least popular kings. In The Two Isabellas of King John, Kristen McQuinn offers new and intriguing insights into two of England’s important yet little understood queen-consorts, the wives of King John. Taking a feminist light, McQuinn brightly shines it on both England’s least well-known consort, Isabella of Gloucester, his first wife, and one of its least popular, Isabelle of Angoulême, his child bride.
The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
by Sarah MangusoA Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.At twenty-one, just starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, vanishing and then returning, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her nine-year struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, depression, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace and self-awareness, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be.
Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love
by Matt LogelinMatt and Liz Logelin were high school sweethearts. After years of long-distance dating, the pair finally settled together in Los Angeles, and they had it all: a perfect marriage, a gorgeous new home, and a baby girl on the way. Liz's pregnancy was rocky, but they welcomed Madeline, beautiful and healthy, into the world on March 24, 2008. Just twenty-seven hours later, Liz suffered a pulmonary embolism and died instantly, without ever holding the daughter whose arrival she had so eagerly awaited. Though confronted with devastating grief and the responsibilities of a new and single father, Matt did not surrender to devastation; he chose to keep moving forward-- to make a life for Maddy. In this memoir, Matt shares bittersweet and often humorous anecdotes of his courtship and marriage to Liz; of relying on his newborn daughter for the support that she unknowingly provided; and of the extraordinary online community of strangers who have become his friends. In honoring Liz's legacy, heartache has become solace.
Two Left Shoes
by Kenneth Roger AdamsDiscover the story of a determined mother who fought hard to keep her family together during wartime and its aftermath, with hardly any support from others. The battle didn’t end with the war; it extended into my own life. Growing up in poverty, I faced my own set of challenges that made every step towards success feel like a steep climb. However, these trials pushed me to strive harder and sparked a desire to help others. This tale follows our family’s journey through hard times, my own fight to achieve my goals, and how these experiences ignited a passion for giving back.
Two Little Girls: A Memoir of Adoption
by Theresa ReidIn Chicago, Theresa Reid and her husband had lucrative careers and a beautiful home. What was missing from their lives was children. But they knew in Eastern Europe there were children who were missing parents -- and they set out to find their family. There was self-doubt and gut-wrenching fear, mountains of paperwork and nerve-racking interviews, agonizing choices and false starts. There was the painful awareness of thousands of children languishing in poorly-funded orphanages, waiting for someone to embrace them and bring them home. And there were Byzantine bureaucracies and poverty-stricken conditions in the former Soviet Republic-where, beyond the borders they crossed and the obstacles they navigated, two little girls waited. This is Theresa Reid's account of how Natalie and Lana came to be her daughters -- a journey that travels not only to Moscow and Kiev but into the deepest parts of a mother's heart. She addresses the issues that arise for many an adoptive parent-including the guilt over taking children away from their roots, the unknowable mysteries of her daughters' earliest childhoods, and the slow, stumbling steps toward trust and tenderness that played out between them.
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
by Janet MalcolmHow had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis? Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master "whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness" and "thin, plain, tense, sour" Alice B. Toklas, the "worker bee" who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate "marriage. " As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. "The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties," she writes. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. "Even the most hermetic of [Stein's] writings are works of submerged autobiography," Malcolm writes. "The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning-you need a crowbar for that-but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion. " Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein "solves the koan of autobiography," or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of "magisterial disorder," Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.
Two Lives of Charlemagne: The Biography, History And Legend Of King Charlemagne, Ruler Of The Frankish Empire (hardcover)
by Einhard Notker the StammererEinhard's Life of Charlemagne is an absorbing chronicle of one of the most powerful and dynamic of all medieval rulers, written by a close friend and adviser. In elegant prose it describes Charlemagne's personal life, details his achievements in reviving learning and the arts, recounts his military successes and depicts one of the defining moments in European history: Charlemagne's coronation as emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800AD. By contrast, Notker's account, written some decades after Charlemagne's death, is a collection of anecdotes rather than a presentation of historical facts.
Two Lives of Charlemagne
by Einhard Notker The StammererCharlemagne---known as the father of Europe---was one of the most powerful and dynamic of all medieval rulers. The biographies brought together here provide a rich and varied portrait of the king from two perspectives: that of Einhard, a close friend and adviser, and of Notker, a monastic scholar and musician writing fifty years after Charlemagne's death. Translated, edited and with notes by David Ganz.
The Two Loves of Will Shakespeare
by Laurie LawlorYoung William Shakespeare should be taking his glove-making apprenticeship much more seriously. However, carousing with his friends, carrying on with women, and sneaking off to see plays are all higher priorities for him. All this changes when Will's best friend, Richard, asks him to write and deliver sonnets to a young woman, pretending the love poems are from Richard. Once Will lays eyes on the exquisitely beautiful Anne Whateley, he is deeply in love. He wants more than anything to make himself into a man worthy of such a young woman. But entanglements with a certain Anne Hathaway, the discovery of an old prank, and his distracted nature all complicate matters for the future Bard of Avon. In this highly entertaining historical novel Laurie Lawlor imagines how there came to be two different marriage license applications taken out on consecutive dates in November of 1582 between eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare and two different women both named Anne.
Two-Man Air Force: Don Gentile & John Godfrey World War Two Flying Aces
by Philip KaplanAmerican volunteers Don Gentile (pronounced Jen-tilly) and John Godfrey flew together as leader and wingman respectively, with the USAAF 4th Fighter Group based at Debden near Cambridge in England. At the end of their missions with the 4th the two of them had accounted for over 58 enemy aircraft destroyed. Major Gentile had scored 22 air and 6 ground kills before he was returned to the USA to help raise money for the war effort. Major Godfrey was credited with 18 air and 12 ground kills before he was shot down and taken prisoner of war. This is the story of their amazing adventures and wartime partnership from their basic training in Canada and then onto England where they first flew the Supermarine Spitfire. It continues with their transfer to the USAAF 4th Fighter Group when the US entered the war and when the two were retrained to fly the P-47 Thunderbolt and eventually the superb P-51 Mustang. These two ace pilots loved life as much as flying - and as well as being hell-bent on destroying the enemy in the skies of Europe they also lived life to the full in their off-duty time in England.
Two Men and a Car: Franklin Roosevelt, Al Capone, And A Cadillac V-8
by Michael GarlandIt is December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt leads a nation in crisis. He must make a speech to a joint session of Congress that will build support for America’s entry to World War II, but to do that he needs an armored vehicle in which to make the short trip from the White House to the Capitol Building. According to legend, the car Roosevelt rode in that day, borrowed from the FBI’s impound lot, was an armored Cadillac V-8 built for gangster Al Capone in the late 1920s to shield himself from enemies. Is the legend true, or is it an American tall tale in the tradition of Paul Bunyan or John Henry? Either way, it’s an ideal vehicle to compare and contrast the lives of two American men who grew up within miles of one another: one a great president, the other an infamous villain. F&P Level Y
Two Minus One: A Memoir
by Kathryn TaylorKirkus Best Books of 2018 &“You can quit waiting for the other shoe to drop: I&’m in it for life.&” Those are the fateful, repeated words that help convince Kathryn Taylor to remarry, retire from her thirty-year profession, sell her home, and relocate in support of her new husband&’s career. But five years later, in a car packed with food she has carefully prepared to nourish her husband&’s dying brother, the other shoe does drop. Taylor&’s husband unexpectedly proclaims he is, &“done with the marriage and doesn&’t want to talk about it.&” With this, the life Taylor has come to know is over. Relying on the strength of a lifelong friend who refuses to let her succumb to the intense waves of grief, she slowly begins to find her way out of grief. Over the course of two years, through appointments with attorneys and therapists, purging shared belongings, and pushing herself to meet new people and do new things, Taylor not only regains a sense of control in her life, she also learns to enjoy the new life she has built, the friendships she&’s formed—and to savor her newfound strength.
Two Mrs. Gibsons
by Toyomi IgusTwo Mrs. Gibsons is author Toyomi Igus's tender and touching tribute to the two most important women in her life--her Japanese mother and her African American grandmother.From memories of her grandmother's big bear hugs to her mother's light down-filled comforter hugs, from listening to her grandmother's lively spirituals to her mother's soft lullabies, from playing with her grandmother's fancy going-to-a-Sunday-meetin' hats to trying on her mother's kimono, Toyomi celebrates the joys and rich diversity of growing up biracial.
Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
by Israel Jacob Yuval Jonathan Chipman Barbara HarshavTwo Nations in Your Womb confronts the historic relationship between Judaism and Christianity from a non-polemical orientation.
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
by Dorothy AllisonBastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction, introduced Dorothy Allison as one of the most passionate and gifted writers of her generation. Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next. Illustrated with photographs from the author's personal collection, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure tells the story of the Gibson women -- sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts -- and the men who loved them, often abused them, and, nonetheless, shared their destinies. With luminous clarity, Allison explores how desire surprises and what power feels like to a young girl as she confronts abuse. As always, Dorothy Allison is provocative, confrontational, and brutally honest. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, steeped in the hard-won wisdom of experience, expresses the strength of her unique vision with beauty and eloquence.
Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (The Crosswicks Journals #4)
by Madeleine L'EngleSince her debut with The Small Rain in 1945, L'Engle has continued to write critically acclaimed books for adults and young readers, including a Newbery Medal-winner, A Wrinkle in Time. But this story of her marriage surpasses her best work so far. Starting with accounts of her childhood, she describes her life as a young woman in Manhattan, attracted to the theater and landing a job as an understudy touring with Eva Le Gallienne and Hugh Franklin. L'Engle and Franklin married in 1946, creating a bond that was broken ony by his death 40 years later. As Franklin's roles (with the Lunts, Ethel Barrymore, Maurice Evans, etc.) kept him absent frequently, there were problems, especially when they became parents. Yet most crises were viewed in perspective, especially when the couple gathered with children, grandchildren and friends at Crosswick, the old house in Connecticut that remains L'Engle's "icon." As expected, she writes beautifully here, sharing funny, exuberant and trying moments of the 'two-part invention.'
Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (The Crosswicks Journals #4)
by Madeleine L'EngleIn the final memoir of her Crosswicks Journals, the author of A Wrinkle in Time paints an intimate portrait of her forty-year marriage.A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. As Newbery Medal winner Madeleine L'Engle describes a relationship characterized by compassion, respect, and growth, as well as challenge and conflict, she beautifully evokes the life she and her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, built and the family they cherished. Beginning with their very different childhoods, L'Engle chronicles the twists and turns that led two young artists to New York City in the 1940s, where they were both pursuing careers in theater. While working on a production of Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, they sparked a connection that would endure until Franklin's death in 1986. L'Engle recalls years spent raising their children at Crosswicks, the Connecticut farmhouse that became an icon of family, and the support she and her husband drew from each other as artists struggling--separately and together--to find both professional and personal fulfillment. At once heartfelt and heartbreaking, Two-Part Invention is L'Engle's most personal work--the revelation of a marriage and the exploration of intertwined lives inevitably marked by love and loss. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Madeleine L'Engle including rare images from the author's estate.
Two Paths: America Divided or United
by John KasichWhen Ohio governor John Kasich ran for president, his powerful message of hope and togetherness struck a chord with American voters. In Two Paths: America Divided or United, he carries that message forward by reflecting on the tumultuous 2016 campaign, sharing his concerns for America and his hopes for our future, and sounding a clarion call to reason and purpose, humility and dignity, righteousness and calm.“The country never looked so grand and magnificent as it did from ten thousand feet,” he writes of his time on the campaign trail, “and it was always a thrilling, faith-affirming thing to look out our window and see the sun splashing across Bryce Canyon in Utah, or the lights of the New York skyline at night as we flew past the Statue of Liberty, or an open field in the heartland that ran as far as our eyes could see.... I’d look out and think what an honor it would be to lead this great nation, what a blessing.”To be sure, the full story of the 2016 Presidential race will be written over time, but to understand what it was to be on the front lines of one of the most divisive and corrosive campaign battlegrounds in history, readers won’t find a richer, more thoughtful firsthand account than this one—a frank, refreshing assessment of the American dynamic and a clear path we might follow toward a more promising tomorrow.As Governor Kasich reminds us in these pages, America is great because America is good—and because Americans have stayed true to who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible.
The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey
by Randy J. SparksThis is a rare glimpse into the 18th century Atlantic World and slave trade from an African perspective. It brings us into the trading communities along the coast of Africa and follows the regular movement of goods, people and ideas across and around the Atlantic.
Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark (Southwestern Writers Collection Series, Wittliff Collections at Texas State University)
by Sam Shepard Johnny DarkSam Shepard was arguably America’s finest working dramatist, as well as an accomplished screenwriter, actor, and director. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote more than forty-five plays, including True West, Fool for Love, and Buried Child. Shepard also appeared in more than fifty films, beginning with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Right Stuff. Despite the publicity his work and life attracted, however, Shepard remained a strongly private man who said many times that he would never write a memoir. But he did write intensively about his inner life and creative work to his former father-in-law and housemate, Johnny Dark, who was Shepard’s closest friend, surrogate brother (they were nearly the same age), and even artistic muse. Two Prospectors gathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between Shepard and Dark. In these gripping, sometimes gut-wrenching letters, the men open themselves to each other with amazing honesty. Shepard’s letters give us the deepest look we will ever get into his personal philosophy and creative process, while in Dark’s letters we discover insights into Shepard’s character that only an intimate friend could provide. The writers also reflect on the books and authors that stimulate their thinking, their relationships with women (including Shepard’s anguished decision to leave his wife and son—Dark’s stepdaughter and grandson—for actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years. Illustrated with Dark’s candid, revealing photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters, Two Prospectors is a compelling portrait of a complex friendship that anchored both lives for decades, a friendship also poignantly captured in Treva Wurmfeld’s film, Shepard & Dark.