How Much Big Is the Sky: A Memoir of a Mother's Love and Unfathomable Loss

How Much Big Is the Sky: A Memoir of a Mother's Love and Unfathomable Loss PDF Author: Sherry Chapman
Publisher: Pedigree Publishing
ISBN: 1951307003
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Multi-award-winning How Much Big Is the Sky is a mother's searingly melodic and eloquent love song to her teenage son, Ryan, following his sudden death resulting from a car crash. Sherry Chapman captures the intimacy and immediacy of her experience with a rare combination of profound tenderness, literary skill, and raw candor. This stunning account of love and loss is structured in five parts resembling the various stages of grief. From the sudden blow of an early morning phone call to a mother's frantic advocacy to her final reflections on what remains, this book is unforgettable. Literary Awards and Honors Include: * Gold medal winner, non-fiction, 2021 Kindle Book Awards * Gold medal winner, adult non-fiction, 2020 Wishing Shelf Book Awards * Winner, Outstanding Memoir category, 2020 IAN Book of the Year Awards * Winner, Memoir, 2020 NABE Pinnacle Book Achievement Award * Winner, Grief, 2020 National Indie Excellence Award * Winner, silver medal, non-fiction – Grief/Hardship, 2020 Readers' Favorite * Winner, second place, non-fiction, 2020 IAN Book of the Year Awards * Honoree, 2020, B.R.A.G. Medallion

How Much Big Is the Sky: A Memoir of a Mother's Love and Unfathomable Loss

How Much Big Is the Sky: A Memoir of a Mother's Love and Unfathomable Loss PDF Author: Sherry Chapman
Publisher: Pedigree Publishing
ISBN: 1951307003
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book

Book Description
Multi-award-winning How Much Big Is the Sky is a mother's searingly melodic and eloquent love song to her teenage son, Ryan, following his sudden death resulting from a car crash. Sherry Chapman captures the intimacy and immediacy of her experience with a rare combination of profound tenderness, literary skill, and raw candor. This stunning account of love and loss is structured in five parts resembling the various stages of grief. From the sudden blow of an early morning phone call to a mother's frantic advocacy to her final reflections on what remains, this book is unforgettable. Literary Awards and Honors Include: * Gold medal winner, non-fiction, 2021 Kindle Book Awards * Gold medal winner, adult non-fiction, 2020 Wishing Shelf Book Awards * Winner, Outstanding Memoir category, 2020 IAN Book of the Year Awards * Winner, Memoir, 2020 NABE Pinnacle Book Achievement Award * Winner, Grief, 2020 National Indie Excellence Award * Winner, silver medal, non-fiction – Grief/Hardship, 2020 Readers' Favorite * Winner, second place, non-fiction, 2020 IAN Book of the Year Awards * Honoree, 2020, B.R.A.G. Medallion

Once More We Saw Stars

Once More We Saw Stars PDF Author: Jayson Greene
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524733547
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
“A gripping and beautiful book about the power of love in the face of unimaginable loss.” --Cheryl Strayed For readers of The Bright Hour and When Breath Becomes Air, a moving, transcendent memoir of loss and a stunning exploration of marriage in the wake of unimaginable grief. As the book opens: two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious, and she is immediately rushed to the hospital. But although it begins with this event and with the anguish Jayson and his wife, Stacy, confront in the wake of their daughter's trauma and the hours leading up to her death, Once More We Saw Stars quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss. Jayson recognizes, even in the midst of his ordeal, that there will be a life for him beyond it--that if only he can continue moving forward, from one moment to the next, he will survive what seems unsurvivable. With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, he captures both the fragility of life and absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love. This is an unforgettable memoir of courage and transformation--and a book that will change the way you look at the world.

Son of a Gun

Son of a Gun PDF Author: Justin St. Germain
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0345538749
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be. Praise for Son of a Gun “[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review “[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR “If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe “A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.”—Entertainment Weekly

Wave

Wave PDF Author: Sonali Deraniyagala
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771025386
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
A brave, intimate, beautifully crafted memoir by a survivor of the tsunami that struck the Sri Lankan coast in 2004 and took her entire family. On December 26, Boxing Day, Sonali Deraniyagala, her English husband, her parents, her two young sons, and a close friend were ending Christmas vacation at the seaside resort of Yala on the south coast of Sri Lanka when a wave suddenly overtook them. She was only to learn later that this was a tsunami that devastated coastlines through Southeast Asia. When the water began to encroach closer to their hotel, they began to run, but in an instant, water engulfed them, Sonali was separated from her family, and all was lost. Sonali Deraniyagala has written an extraordinarily honest, utterly engrossing account of the surreal tragedy of a devastating event that all at once ended her life as she knew it and her journey since in search of understanding and redemption. It is also a remarkable portrait of a young family's life and what came before, with all the small moments and larger dreams that suddenly and irrevocably ended.

Wild

Wild PDF Author: Cheryl Strayed
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781838959548
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'One of the best books I've read in the last five or ten years... Wild is angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written, and I think it's destined to be loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time.' Nick Hornby

On Chapel Sands

On Chapel Sands PDF Author: Laura Cumming
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501198726
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Velazquez shares a riveting true story “with as many twists and turns as any mystery” (Los Angeles Times) describing her mother’s mysterious kidnapping as a toddler in a small English coastal village—“an incredible and incredibly unusual book about family secrets” (Nick Hornby, The Believer). In the fall of 1929, when Laura Cumming’s mother was three years old, she was kidnapped from a beach on the Lincolnshire coast of England. There were no screams when she was taken, suggesting the culprit was someone familiar to her, and when she turned up again in a nearby village several days later, she was happy and in perfect health. No one was ever accused of a crime. The incident quickly faded from her memory, and her parents never discussed it. To the contrary, they deliberately hid it from her, and she did not learn of it for half a century. This was not the only secret her parents kept from her. For many years, while raising her in draconian isolation and protectiveness, they also hid the fact that she’d been adopted, and that shortly after the kidnapping, her name was changed from Grace to Betty. “Both page-turning and richly absorbing” (The Providence Journal), On Chapel Sands (originally titled Five Days Gone) unspools the tale of Cumming’s mother’s life and unravels the multiple mysteries at its core. Using photographs from the time, historical documents, and works of art, Cumming investigates this case of stolen identity w​ith the toolset of a detective and the unique intimacy of a daughter trying to understand her family’s past and its legacies. “Brilliant” (The Guardian) and “a story told with such depth of feeling and observation and such lyrical writing I couldn’t put it down” (Anna Quindlen), On Chapel Sands is a masterful blend of memoir and history, an extraordinary personal narrative unlike any other.

The Forty Rules of Love

The Forty Rules of Love PDF Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101189940
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
In this lyrical, exuberant tale, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese's Book Club Pick), incarnates Rumi's timeless message of love The Forty Rules of Love unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together explore the enduring power of Rumi's work. Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shams's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mir­rors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free.

Becoming Mother

Becoming Mother PDF Author: Sharon Tjaden-Glass
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996332804
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"Becoming Mother" tells the story of a woman becoming a mother. It is a reflective memoir that spans from pregnancy through the end of the first year postpartum. It follows the author as she resists, denies, copes with, and ultimately embraces her identity as a mother. This isn't a guide or a parenting book. Its goal isn't to convert you to one brand of motherhood or another. Instead, its goal is to show you what becoming a mother can be like. Without sarcasm. Without boasting or martyrdom. Just the plain, messy truth of what it's like for one to become two.

Too Much and Not the Mood

Too Much and Not the Mood PDF Author: Durga Chew-Bose
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374535957
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer's Diary with the words "too much and not the mood." She was describing how tired she was of correcting her own writing, of the "cramming in and the cutting out" to please other readers, wondering if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The character of that sentiment, the attitude of it, inspired Durga Chew-Bose to write and collect her own work. The result is a lyrical and piercingly insightful collection of essays and her own brand of essay-meets-prose poetry about identity and culture. Inspired by Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Lydia Davis's short prose, and Vivian Gornick's exploration of interior life, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression. Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today.

Rising

Rising PDF Author: Elizabeth Rush
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
ISBN: 1571319700
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize Finalist, this powerful elegy for our disappearing coast “captures nature with precise words that almost amount to poetry” (The New York Times). Hailed as “the book on climate change and sea levels that was missing” (Chicago Tribune), Rising is both a highly original work of lyric reportage and a haunting meditation on how to let go of the places we love. With every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant—and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. In Rising, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through these dramatic changes, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish. Rush sheds light on the unfolding crises through firsthand testimonials—a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a neighborhood in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves hundreds of years ago—woven together with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of these vulnerable communities. A Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal Best Book Of 2018 Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award A Chicago Tribune Top Ten Book of 2018