The Man Who Walked Backward

The Man Who Walked Backward PDF Author: Ben Montgomery
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316438049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
From Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery, the story of a Texas man who, during the Great Depression, walked around the world -- backwards. Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary -- something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he'd lost. He decided to walk around the world -- backwards. In The Man Who Walked Backward, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery charts Plennie's backwards trek across the America that gave rise to Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and the New Deal. With the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a backdrop, Montgomery follows Plennie across the Atlantic through Germany, Turkey, and beyond, and details the daring physical feats, grueling hardships, comical misadventures, and hostile foreign police he encountered along the way. A remarkable and quirky slice of Americana, The Man Who Walked Backward paints a rich and vibrant portrait of a jaw-dropping period of history.

The Man Who Walked Backward

The Man Who Walked Backward PDF Author: Ben Montgomery
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316438049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery, the story of a Texas man who, during the Great Depression, walked around the world -- backwards. Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary -- something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he'd lost. He decided to walk around the world -- backwards. In The Man Who Walked Backward, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery charts Plennie's backwards trek across the America that gave rise to Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and the New Deal. With the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a backdrop, Montgomery follows Plennie across the Atlantic through Germany, Turkey, and beyond, and details the daring physical feats, grueling hardships, comical misadventures, and hostile foreign police he encountered along the way. A remarkable and quirky slice of Americana, The Man Who Walked Backward paints a rich and vibrant portrait of a jaw-dropping period of history.

Walking Backward

Walking Backward PDF Author: Catherine Austen
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
ISBN: 1554695554
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
When Josh's mother dies in a phobia-induced car crash, she leaves two questions for her grieving family: how did a snake get into her car and how do you mourn with no faith to guide you? Twelve-year-old Josh is left alone to find the answers. His father is building a time machine. His four-year-old brother's closest friend is a plastic Power Ranger. His psychiatrist offers nothing more than a blank journal and platitudes. Isolated by grief in a home where every day is pajama day, Josh makes death his research project. He tests the mourning practices of religions he doesn't believe in. He tries to mend his little brother's shattered heart. He observes, records and waits—for his life to feel normal, for his mother's death to make sense, for his father to come out of the basement. His observations, recorded in a series of journal entries, are funny, smart, insightful—and heartbreaking. His conclusions about the nature of love, loss, grief and the space-time continuum are nothing less than life-changing.

Around the World Backwards

Around the World Backwards PDF Author: Plennie L. Wingo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780890153635
Category : Depressions
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description


Backward Glances

Backward Glances PDF Author: Mark W. Turner
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861891808
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Focusing upon gay street life in London and New York, Mark Turner presents this gay urban history of male street cruising.

The Man who Walked Through Walls

The Man who Walked Through Walls PDF Author: Marcel Ayme
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN: 1908968206
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The excellent Monsieur Dutilleul has always been able to pass through walls, but has never seen the point of using his gift, given the general availability of doors. One day, however, his tyrannical boss drives him to desperate, creative measures — he develops a taste for intramural travel and becomes something of a super-villain. How will the unassuming clerk adjust to a glamorous life of crime? Aymé’s genius lies in imagining the practical unfolding of bizarre and difficult situations. In each story, anarchic comedy is arrested by moments of pathos, only to descend into anarchy and hilarity once more ...

Backwards

Backwards PDF Author: Nanci L. Danison
Publisher: A.P. Lee & Company, Limited
ISBN: 9781934482391
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The true story of a big firm attorney's death, afterlife, and return to human life that will astound you with its details about the purpose of life, what the afterlife is like, and how we can improve our human lives by using spiritual powers

Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Wild Ducks Flying Backward PDF Author: Tom Robbins
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553902946
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Known for his meaty seriocomic novels–expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow–Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country- music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. Whether he is rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Robbins’s briefer writings often exhibit the same five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are a couple of short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an off-beat assessment of our divided nation. And wherever we open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, we’re apt to encounter examples of the intently serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”

Leper Spy

Leper Spy PDF Author: Ben Montgomery
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613734336
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The GIs called her Joey. Hundreds owed their lives to the tiny Filipina who stashed explosives in spare tires, tracked Japanese troop movements, and smuggled maps of fortifications across enemy lines. As the Battle of Manila raged, Josefina Guerrero walked through gunfire to bandage wounds and close the eyes of the dead. Her valor earned her the Medal of Freedom, but what made her a good spy was also destroying her: leprosy, which so horrified the Japanese they refused to search her. After the war, army chaplains found her in a nightmarish leper colony and fought for the US government to do something it had never done: welcome a foreigner with leprosy. This brought her celebrity, which she used to publicly speak for other sufferers. However, the notoriety haunted her and she sought a way to disappear. Ben Montgomery now brings Guerrero's heroic accomplishments to light.

The Man Who Lived Backwards and Other Stories

The Man Who Lived Backwards and Other Stories PDF Author: Charles F. Hall
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781976499418
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description
Charles F. Hall's story "The Man who Lived Backwards" is known to have influenced C.S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce." Hall published three short stories in various periodicals in1938. This volume collects the three known stories by Hall, with an introduction by Douglas A. Anderson detailing all that is known about the writer.--cf. p. [4] of cover.

Grandma Gatewood's Walk

Grandma Gatewood's Walk PDF Author: Ben Montgomery
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613747217
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Winner of the 2014 National Outdoor Book Awards for History/Biography Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. There she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it." Grandma Gatewood, as the reporters called her, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity and appeared on TV and in the pages of Sports Illustrated. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction. Author Ben Montgomery was given unprecedented access to Gatewood's own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence, and interviewed surviving family members and those she met along her hike, all to answer the question so many asked: Why did she do it? The story of Grandma Gatewood will inspire readers of all ages by illustrating the full power of human spirit and determination. Even those who know of Gatewood don't know the full story—a story of triumph from pain, rebellion from brutality, hope from suffering.