Stone Motel

Stone Motel PDF Author: Morris Ardoin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827759
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find creative ways to stay cool and out of trouble. When they were not doing their chores—handling a colorful cast of customers, scrubbing motel-room toilets, plucking chicken bones and used condoms from under the beds—they played canasta, an old ladies’ game that provided them with a refuge from the sun and helped them avoid their violent, troubled father. Morris was successful at occupying his time with his siblings and the children of families staying in the motel’s kitchenette apartments but was not so successful at keeping clear of his father, a man unable to shake the horrors he had experienced as a child and, later, as a soldier. The preteen would learn as he matured that his father had reserved his most ferocious attacks for him because of an inability to accept a gay or, to his mind, broken, son. It became his dad’s mission to “fix” his son, and Morris’s mission to resist—and survive intact. He was aided in his struggle immeasurably by the love and encouragement of a selfless and generous grandmother, who provides his story with much of its warmth, wisdom, and humor. There’s also suspense, awkward romance, naughty French lessons, and an insider’s take on a truly remarkable, not-yet-homogenized pocket of American culture.

Stone Motel

Stone Motel PDF Author: Morris Ardoin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827759
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find creative ways to stay cool and out of trouble. When they were not doing their chores—handling a colorful cast of customers, scrubbing motel-room toilets, plucking chicken bones and used condoms from under the beds—they played canasta, an old ladies’ game that provided them with a refuge from the sun and helped them avoid their violent, troubled father. Morris was successful at occupying his time with his siblings and the children of families staying in the motel’s kitchenette apartments but was not so successful at keeping clear of his father, a man unable to shake the horrors he had experienced as a child and, later, as a soldier. The preteen would learn as he matured that his father had reserved his most ferocious attacks for him because of an inability to accept a gay or, to his mind, broken, son. It became his dad’s mission to “fix” his son, and Morris’s mission to resist—and survive intact. He was aided in his struggle immeasurably by the love and encouragement of a selfless and generous grandmother, who provides his story with much of its warmth, wisdom, and humor. There’s also suspense, awkward romance, naughty French lessons, and an insider’s take on a truly remarkable, not-yet-homogenized pocket of American culture.

Hotel Insomnia

Hotel Insomnia PDF Author: Charles Simic
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156421829
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
Mixes the haunted world of the poet's East European memory with the American present in verses that fill the wee hours of the evening with angels, pigs, riddles, cemeteries, and dolls that smile

The Negro Motorist Green Book

The Negro Motorist Green Book PDF Author: Victor H. Green
Publisher: Colchis Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

The Motel Life

The Motel Life PDF Author: Willy Vlautin
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061171115
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
With "echoes of Of Mice and Men"(The Bookseller, UK), The Motel Life explores the frustrations and failed dreams of two Nevada brothers—on the run after a hit-and-run accident—who, forgotten by society, and short on luck and hope, desperately cling to the edge of modern life.

Inside the Dream Palace

Inside the Dream Palace PDF Author: Sherill Tippins
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471135284
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
The Chelsea Hotel, since its founding by a visionary French architect in 1884, has been an icon of American invention: a cultural dynamo and haven for the counterculture, all in one astonishing building. Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House,delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Sid Vicious, and Dee Dee Ramone. Now as legendary as the artists it has housed and the countless creative collaborations it has sparked, the Chelsea has always stood as a mystery as well: why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists' community in the known world? Inside the Dream Palaceis the intimate and definitive story.

Operation Hotel California

Operation Hotel California PDF Author: Mike Tucker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0762799048
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Operation Hotel California is the definitive inside account of the secret CIA mission that paved the way for the Iraq War. Based on exclusive interviews with the team leader, Charles S. Faddis—who retired in 2008 and whose name was publicly revealed in this book for the first time—it is also the most blistering indictment by any U.S. counterterrorism officer of America’s blunders vis-à-vis Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Its lessons are vital as a new administration seeks to withdraw securely from Iraq and fight extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

A People's Guide to Greater Boston

A People's Guide to Greater Boston PDF Author: Joseph Nevins
Publisher:
ISBN: 0520294521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
"Herein, we bring you to sites that have been central to the lives of 'the people' of Greater Boston over four centuries. You'll visit sites associated with the area's indigenous inhabitants and with the individuals and movements who sought to abolish slavery, to end war, challenge militarism, and bring about a more peaceful world, to achieve racial equity, gender justice, and sexual liberation, and to secure the rights of workers. We take you to some well-known sites, but more often to ones far off the well-beaten path of the Freedom Trail, to places in Boston's outlying neighborhoods. We also visit sites in numerous other municipalities that make up the Greater Boston region-from places such as Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn to Concord and Plymouth. The sites to which we do 'travel' include homes given that people's struggles, activism, and organizing sometimes unfold, or are even birthed in many cases in living rooms and kitchens. Trying to capture a place as diverse and dynamic as Boston is highly challenging. (One could say that about any 'big' place.) We thus want to make clear that our goal is not to be comprehensive, or to 'do justice' to the region. Given the constraints of space and time as well as the limitations of knowledge--both our own and what is available in published form--there are many important sites, cities, and towns that we have not included. Thus, in exploring scores of sites across Boston and numerous municipalities, our modest goal is to paint a suggestive portrait of the greater urban area that highlights its long-contested nature. In many ways, we merely scratch the region's surface--or many surfaces--given the multiple layers that any one place embodies. In writing about Greater Boston as a place, we run the risk of suggesting that the city writ-large has some sort of essence. Indeed, the very notion of a particular place assumes intrinsic characteristics and an associated delimited space. After all, how can one distinguish one place from another if it has no uniqueness and is not geographically differentiated? Nonetheless, geographer Doreen Massey insists that we conceive of places as progressive, as flowing over the boundaries of any particular space, time, or society; in other words, we should see places as processual or ever-changing, as unbounded in that they shape and are shaped by other places and forces from without, and as having multiple identities. In exploring Greater Boston from many venues over 400 years, we embrace this approach. That said, we have to reconcile this with the need to delimit Greater Boston--for among other reasons, simply to be in a position to name it and thus distinguish it from elsewhere"--

Looking for The Gulf Motel

Looking for The Gulf Motel PDF Author: Richard Blanco
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822978393
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Family continues to be a wellspring of inspiration and learning for Blanco. His third book of poetry, Looking for The Gulf Motel is a genealogy of the heart, exploring how his family's emotional legacy has shaped—and continues shaping—his perspectives. The collection is presented in three movements, each one chronicling his understanding of a particular facet of life from childhood into adulthood. As a child born into the milieu of his Cuban exiled familia, the first movement delves into early questions of cultural identity and their evolution into his unrelenting sense of displacement and quest for the elusive meaning of home. The second begins with poems peering back into family again, examining the blurred lines of gender, the frailty of his father-son relationship, and the intersection of his cultural and sexual identities as a Cuban-American gay man living in rural Maine. In the last movement, poems focused on his mother's life shaped by exile, his father's death, and the passing of a generation of relatives, all provide lessons about his own impermanence in the world and the permanence of loss. Looking for the Gulf Motel is looking for the beauty of that which we cannot hold onto, be it country, family, or love.

The Voyeur's Motel

The Voyeur's Motel PDF Author: Gay Talese
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802189733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The controversial chronicle of a motel owner who secretly studied the sex lives of his guests by the renowned journalist and author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife. On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark bestseller Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. “Since learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America,” the letter began, “I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.” The man—Gerald Foos—hen divulged an astonishing secret: he had bought a motel outside Denver for the express purpose of satisfying his voyeuristic desires. Underneath its peaked roof, he had built an “observation platform” through which he could peer down on his unwitting guests. Over the years, Foos sent Talese hundreds of pages of notes on his guests, work that Foos believed made him a pioneering researcher into American society and sexuality. Through his Voyeur’s motel, he witnessed and recorded the harsh effects of the war in Vietnam, the upheaval in gender roles, the decline of segregation, and much more. In The Voyeur’s Motel. “the reader observes Talese observing Foos observing his guests.” An extraordinary work of narrative journalism, it is at once an examination of one unsettling man and a portrait of the secret life of the American heartland over the latter half of the twentieth century (Daily Mail, UK). “This is a weird book about weird people doing weird things, and I wouldn’t have put it down if the house were on fire.” —John Greenya, Washington Times

Hotels of North America

Hotels of North America PDF Author: Rick Moody
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 1782832203
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Reginald Edward Morse is a man in need of an outlet. And he finds it in a very twenty-first century place: the internet. Specifically, RateYourLodging.com, where Americans go to find out the truth about hotels, motels and, horrors, bed and breakfasts. But the real joy of those sites is not so much the advice they offer, but the people who offer it. Reginald Edward Morse is one of those people. At first Morse seems exactly what you'd suspect a reviewer to be, though under the authoritative, even puffed-up tone, there lurks self-awareness, wit and a flair for anecdote. His reviews scatter clues to his identity, and the fragments explain the mystery of Reginald Edward Morse, his career as a motivational speaker, his lover 'K' and his estrangement from his daughter. Always funny, unexpectedly tragic, this is a book of lonely rooms, long lists, of strong opinion and quiet confession, by one of America's greatest novelists.