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- A Kid from Marlboro Road [electronic resource] : by Burns, Edward.aut; Burns, Edward.nrt; cloudLibrary;
An Irish-American family comes to life through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy in this debut novel by actor-filmmaker Ed Burns. Immigrants and storytellers, lilting voices and Long Island moxy are all part of this colorful Irish-Catholic community in 1970s New York.A Kid from Marlboro Road opens at a wake, as our twelve-year-old narrator, an aspiring writer, takes in the death of his beloved grandfather, Pop, a larger-than-life figure to him. The overflowing crowd includes sandhogs in their muddy work boots, old Irish biddies in black dresses and cops in uniform, along with the family in mourning. There’s an open casket, the first time he’s seen a dead person. Later, at the bar across the street, he tells a story to the assembled crowd about the day his dad proposed to his mom, and how he almost got beat up by her brothers for it, and then how Pop made him propose twice. His mom calls him “Kneenie,” and with her husband and older son Tommy lost to her, he’s the best thing she’s got. He sees her struggling with depression and is worried his parents might get divorced, but doesn’t know how to help—since like his brother and father before him he knows he’ll also abandon her soon enough.Stories cascade between the prior generation’s colorful origins in the Bronx and the softer world of the of Gibson, the town on Long Island where the family lives now. There are scenes in the Rockaways, at Belmont Race Track, and in Montauk. Out of individual struggles a collective warmth emerges, a certain kind of American story, raucous and joyous.Includes black and white photographs from the author's Irish-American New York family history.- Subjects: Audiobooks.; Coming of Age; Cultural Heritage; Family Life;
- © 2024., Recorded Books,
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- Lytton Climate Change, Colonialism and Life Before the Fire [electronic resource] : by Edwards, Peter.aut; Loring, Kevin.aut; cloudLibrary;
From bestselling true-crime author Peter Edwards and Governor General's Award-winning playwright Kevin Loring, two sons of Lytton, BC, the town that burned to the ground in 2021, comes a meditation on hometown―when hometown is gone. “It’s dire,” Greta Thunberg retweeted Mayor JanPolderman. “The whole town is on fire. It took a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.” Before it made global headlines as the small town that burned down during a record-breaking heatwave in June 2021, while briefly the hottest placeon Earth, Lytton, British Columbia, had a curious past. Named for the author of the infamous line, “It was a dark and stormy night,” Lytton was also where Peter Edwards, organized-crime journalist and author of seventeen non-fiction books, spent his childhood. Although only about 500 people lived in Lytton, Peter liked to joke that he was only the second-best writer to come from his tiny hometown. His grade-school classmate’s nephew Kevin Loring, Nlaka’pamux from Lytton First Nation, had grown up to be a Governor General’s Award–winning playwright.         The Nlaka’pamux called Lytton “The Centre of the World,” a view Buddhists would share in the late twentieth century, as they set up a temple just outside town. A gold rush in 1858 saw conflict with a wave of Californians come to a head with the Canyon War at the junction of the mighty Fraser and Thompson rivers. The Nlaka’pamux lost over thirty lives in that conflict, as did the American gold seekers. In modern times, many outsiders would seek shelter there, often people who just didn’t fit anywhere else and were hoping for a little anonymity in the mountains.         Told from the shared perspective of an Indigenous playwright and the journalist son of a settler doctor who pushed back against the divisions that existed between populations, Lytton portrays all the warmth, humour and sincerity of small-town life. A colourful little town that burned to the ground could be every town’s warning if we don’t take seriously what this unique place has to teach us.- Subjects: Electronic books.; Canada; Rural; Native Americans;
- © 2024., Random House of Canada,
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