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- Bread of angels / by Smith, Patti,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith. A post-World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbors, an infested rat house, and beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child's world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with tortoises and turns pennies into gold. The most intimate of Smith's suite of memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us from her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and records such as Horses and Easter, Dancing Barefoot and Because the Night. Then she leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a mystical life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She creates a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family. As Smith loses those around her, grief, loss, and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again. The one constant in a life driven by artistic fire and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live"--- Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Smith, Patti.; Poets, American; Rock musicians; Women rock musicians;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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- Beyond this harbor : adventurous tales of the heart / by Styron, Rose,author.;
"An intimate portrait of a celebrated magic life and the famous and infamous who dropped in, summered, traveled with, played with, and the decades of friendship with everyone from Truman Capote and Robert Penn Warren to the Kennedys, the Bernsteins, Alexander Calder, John Hersey, and Lillian Hellman. Here as well are the years of dedication and risk, traveling the world, from Pinochet's Chile to El Salvador, Belfast, and Sarajevo, as Rose Styron, in search of those hiding from dictators and autocrats, bore witness to atrocities and human rights violations ... Styron writes of her childhood, born into a German Jewish, assimilated Baltimore family; a rebel from the start, studying poetry at Wellesley, Harvard, Johns Hopkins; traveling to Rome and her (second) meeting with Bill (the first time, "I can't remember even shaking hands. I wasn't thinking about him at all."); their eventual marriage, and their more than fifty years together--in bucolic Roxbury, Connecticut, and on Martha's Vineyard. She writes of Bill's writing and of retyping his manuscripts, discussing his writing progress, having babies, with visits from neighbors Arthur Miller; Mike Nichols and various wives; Dustin Hoffman buying the house over the hill; James Baldwin moving in to Styron's writing studio and writing The Fire Next Time, with Baldwin encouraging Styron to write Nat Turner in first person; Frank Sinatra, sailing into Vineyard Haven Harbor and soon dropping by for dinners chez Styrons; the Kennedys having rowdy sleepovers ... And she writes in detail about Bill Styron's full-on breakdowns, his recovery from the first depression; writing Darkness Visible. And fifteen years later, the second much worse crash; Bill Styron's death; her year of grief, teaching at Harvard; living full time on the Vineyard and making a new full life there ... "--- Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Styron, Rose.; Styron, William, 1925-2006; Human rights workers; Poets, American;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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- Em / by Thúy, Kim,author.; Fischman, Sheila,translator.; translation of:Thúy, Kim.Em.English.;
"Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym--aimer, to love--resonates on every page, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit and intelligence of Vietnamese-Americans, Vietnamese-Canadians and other Vietnamese former refugees who go on to build some of the most powerful small business empires in the world. Em is a poetic story steeped in history, about those most impacted by the violence and their later accomplishments. In many ways, Em is perhaps Kim Thúy's most personal book, the one in which she trusts her readers enough to share with them not only the pervasive love she feels but also the rage and the horror at what she and so many other children of the Vietnam War had to live through. Written in Kim Thúy's trademark style, near to prose poetry, Em reveals her fascination with connection. Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today's global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees--and everything in between. Here are human lives shaped both by unspeakable trauma and also the beautiful sacrifices of those who made sure at least some of these children survived"--- Subjects: Psychological fiction.; Experimental fiction.; Immigrants; Vietnam War, 1961-1975;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 2
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- Crash of the heavens : the remarkable story of Hannah Senesh and the only military mission to rescue Europe's Jews during World War ll / by Century, Douglas,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate Europe's entire Jewish population. When it became clear that the Allies were unwilling to spare any forces from the war effort to save civilians, the Jewish community in Palestine came up with a daring plan. Working with British Military Intelligence, an elite unit of young Jewish paratroopers volunteered to return to Eastern Europe. Once behind enemy lines, they would use their expertise in the local languages and terrain to rescue thousands of downed Allied pilots and escaped POWs who were trapped with no way to communicate -- highly trained airmen desperately needed by the British and American air forces to fly more bombing missions. At the same time, these volunteer commandos would help Jewish civilians escape deportation to Auschwitz and other death camps or take up arms in resistance against the Nazis. Hannah Senesh was one of only three female paratroopers who risked everything to infiltrate occupied Europe. In 1939, at just eighteen years old, Hannah emigrated from Hungary to the British Mandate for Palestine, where she dreamed of being a poet and a schoolteacher. Instead, she became a poet and a paratrooper. Five years after fleeing Europe, Hannah parachuted back into occupied territory as a freedom fighter with the most crucial role in her team: the wireless operator tasked with sending and deciphering top-secret British radio codes. Though captured almost immediately after crossing the border into Hungary, she refused to give up her radio codes or any information about her mission, despite enduring months of horrific torture. Her final act of defiance -- choosing to die before a firing squad rather than beg for clemency -- cemented her legendary status as the "Jewish Joan of Arc." Hannah's legacy lives on today in the widely published diary she'd kept since age thirteen and in her poetry which has inspired generations. Each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a short poem Hannah composed on the shores of the Mediterranean in 1942 is sung at ceremonies around the world. Titled "Eli, Eli," or "My God, My God," it has become a modern hymn, taught in schools, sung in synagogues, and printed in thousands of prayer books"--- Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Senesh, Hannah, 1921-1944.; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Jews; Jewish women; Parachute troops; World War, 1939-1945;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Results 91 to 94 of 94 | « previous