The Nearest Thing to Life

The Nearest Thing to Life PDF Author: James Wood
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611687438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works - among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to LifeÊis not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic - it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

The Nearest Thing to Life

The Nearest Thing to Life PDF Author: James Wood
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611687438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works - among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to LifeÊis not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic - it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

Memoirs of My Life and Times

Memoirs of My Life and Times PDF Author: John Charles Fremont
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
ISBN: 1461732093
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 848

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Book Description
During his remarkable life, John Charles Frémont served as a senator for the newly-formed state of California, led Union troops in the Civil War, and was governor of the territory of Arizona. His race for the presidency in 1856 brought prestige to the fledgling Republican Party, yet despite his popularity, his uncompromising determination to abolish slavery cost him the election. For all of his experiences in politics and the military, it was the earlier decades of Frémont's life that were the most exciting. Shortly after graduating from college, he joined a mapping expedition and surveyed the hills of South Carolina and Tennessee for the government. Eager to continue exploring, Frémont went on five more expeditions to America west of the Appalachians during the years from 1839 to 1846. He traveled up the Missouri river, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and reached the West Coast on several journeys, often with his friend Kit Carson, the legendary mountain man. In Memoirs of My Life, Frémont recounts those years in the wilderness, encountering the fabulous landscapes and native people of America's interior before the westward expansion of the U. S. His journeys across the unmapped prairies, mountains, and deserts offer a wonderful glimpse of North America's natural grandeur in its original state.

The American Dream?

The American Dream? PDF Author: Shing Yin Khor
Publisher: Zest Books
ISBN: 1942186371
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
As a child growing up in Malaysia, Shing Yin Khor had two very different ideas of what “America” meant. The first looked a lot like Hollywood, full of beautiful people and sunlight and freeways. The second looked more like The Grapes of Wrath - a nightmare landscape filled with impoverished people, broken-down cars, barren landscapes, and broken dreams. Those contrasting ideas have stuck with Shing ever since, even now that she lives and works in LA. The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 is Shing’s attempt to find what she can of both of these Americas on a solo journey (small adventure-dog included) across the entire expanse of that iconic road, beginning in Santa Monica and ending up Chicago. And what begins as a road trip ends up as something more like a pilgrimage in search of an American landscape that seems forever shifting, forever out of place.

Right Or Wrong

Right Or Wrong PDF Author: Tim Bell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472909356
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Tim Bell is the original 'spin doctor'; the Chairman of Bell Pottinger public relations, and one of the best known figures in UK media communications. Right or Wrong is his highly personal account of political, commercial and social life from the '70s to the present day. With a refreshingly uncompromising manner, Bell applies his acerbic wit and resolutely right wing sensibility to everything from managing Margaret Thatcher's election campaigns to his dealings with Ronald Reagan, F.W. de Klerk, the Saatchi brothers, and his late friend David Frost, to name a few. Born into a resolutely middle-class suburban family during the war, he left school at the age of 18 for a job as chart-boy at ABC Television. Rising through the ranks of the burgeoning West End advertising industry, in 1970 he became a co-founder of the Saatchi & Saatchi agency. Bell's main claim to fame, however, was developing campaigns for the Conservative Party during the general elections of 1979, 1983 and 1987, each of which put Margaret Thatcher into Downing Street, and for which he was awarded a knighthood. In his time, he has worked with some of the greatest names of modern politics, business, and media and on world events, historical and controversial alike. First hand memories spill across the pages as Tim Bell gives his ring-side account of key political moments such as the miner`s strike, the Cold War, the poll tax riots, the end of Apartheid and the demise of Margaret Thatcher. Controversial, irreverent and outspoken, this is a book that is as polarising as Tim Bell himself. It will attract admiration and rage in equal measure. And he would not have it any other way.Right or Wrong was shortlisted for the Political Biography of the Year in the Political Book Awards 2015.

A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America

A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America PDF Author: Charles Comfort Tiffany
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description


Memoir of the Public Life of the Right Hon. John Charles Herries

Memoir of the Public Life of the Right Hon. John Charles Herries PDF Author: Edward Herries
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Memoirs

Memoirs PDF Author: Robert Lowell
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374712182
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A complete collection of Robert Lowell’s autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life. Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell’s lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell’s mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell’s reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell’s expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell’s achievement. Includes black-and-white photographs

A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States

A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States PDF Author: Charles Comfort Tiffany
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 654

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Standing Against the Whirlwind

Standing Against the Whirlwind PDF Author: Diana Hochstedt Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195359054
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Standing Against the Whirlwind is a history of the Evangelical party in the Episcopal Church in nineteenth-century America. A surprising revisionist account of the church's first century, it reveals the extent to which evangelical Episcopalians helped to shape the piety, identity, theology, and mission of the church. Using the life and career of one of the party's greatest leaders, Charles Pettit McIlvaine, the second bishop of Ohio, Diana Butler blends institutional history with biography to explore the vicissitudes and tribulations of evangelicals in a church that often seemed inhospitable to their version of the Gospel. This gracefully written narrative history of a neglected movement sheds light on evangelical religion within a particular denomination and broadens the interpretation of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism as a whole. In addition, it elucidates such wider cultural and religious issues as the meaning of millennialism and the nature of the crisis over slavery.

The American Church History Series: A history of the Protestant Episcopal Church, by C.C. Tiffany

The American Church History Series: A history of the Protestant Episcopal Church, by C.C. Tiffany PDF Author: Philip Schaff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description