Author: Richard Pryor
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 9780375700484
Category : Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Pryor tells the story of his life, from his childhood in Peoria, Illinois, through his growth as a comedian, to his battle with addiction and, in later years, multiple sclerosis.
Author: David Henry
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616204478
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Provides a rare glimpse into the life of an outrageously human, fearlessly black, openly angry and profanely outspoken comedic genius whose humble beginnings as the child of a prostitute helped shaped him into one of the most influential and outstanding performers of our time.
Author: Scott Saul
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062123335
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 485
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Book Description
A major biography—intimate, gripping, revelatory—of an artist who revolutionized American comedy. Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family’s brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to the stage, originally, to escape the hard-bitten realities of his childhood, but later came to a reverberating discovery: that by plunging into the depths of his experience, he could make stand-up comedy as exhilarating and harrowing as the life he’d known. He brought that trembling vitality to Hollywood, where his movie career—Blazing Saddles, the buddy comedies with Gene Wilder, Blue Collar—flowed directly out of his spirit of creative improvisation. The major studios considered him dangerous. Audiences felt plugged directly into the socket of life. Becoming Richard Pryor brings the man and his comic genius into focus as never before. Drawing upon a mountain of original research—interviews with family and friends, court transcripts, unpublished journals, screenplay drafts—Scott Saul traces Pryor’s rough journey to the heights of fame: from his heartbreaking childhood, his trials in the Army, and his apprentice days in Greenwich Village to his soul-searching interlude in Berkeley and his ascent in the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s. Becoming Richard Pryor illuminates an entertainer who, by bringing together the spirits of the black freedom movement and the counterculture, forever altered the DNA of American comedy. It reveals that, while Pryor made himself a legend with his own account of his life onstage, the full truth of that life is more bracing still.
Author: Rain Pryor
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061745960
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
The loving, witty, yet brutally honest memoir of the daughter of comedy legend Richard Pryor. Rain Pryor was born in the idealistic, free-love 1960s. Her mother was a Jewish go-go dancer who wanted a tribe of rainbow children. Rain’s father was Richard Pryor, perhaps the most compelling and brilliant comedian of his era, a man whose self-destructiveness was as legendary as his groundbreaking comedy. Jokes My Father Never Taught Me is an intimate, harrowing, poignant, and often hilarious memoir that explores the divided heritage and the forces that shaped a wildly schizophrenic childhood. It is the story of a girl who grew up adoring her father even as she feared him—and feared for him, as his drug problems got worse. Both lovingly told and painfully frank, it is an unprecedented look at the life of a comedy icon, told by a daughter who both understood the genius and knew the tortured man within. Praise for Jokes My Father Never Taught Me “Rain Pryor pulls no punches . . . Using the same profanity-laced wit her father perfected, she unspools darkly comic stories . . . but never devolves into self-pity or bitterness.” —Entertainment Weekly “Vital, entertaining and appalling, Pryor has fleshed out a familiar dysfunctional family refrain—”It was a lot easier to love him if you didn’t know him”—with bravery and wit.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: James Haskins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780825302008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
Traces the life of the popular Black comedian, from his childhood in Peoria, Illinois, to his work on the nightclub circuit, and his eventual success in movies and television
Author: Jr Richard Pryor
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781629333885
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
"I survived. And that's what my book is about, a real-life story of overcoming obstacles, surviving, and thriving." - Richard Pryor Jr.
Author: Rebecca Nichols Alonzo
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 1414338295
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
2011 Retailers Choice Award winner! Rebecca never felt safe as a child. In 1969, her father, Robert Nichols, moved to Sellerstown, North Carolina, to serve as a pastor. There he found a small community eager to welcome him—with one exception. Glaring at him from pew number seven was a man obsessed with controlling the church. Determined to get rid of anyone who stood in his way, he unleashed a plan of terror that was more devastating and violent than the Nichols family could have ever imagined. Refusing to be driven away by acts of intimidation, Rebecca’s father stood his ground until one night when an armed man walked into the family’s kitchen . . . And Rebecca’s life was shattered. If anyone had a reason to harbor hatred and seek personal revenge, it would be Rebecca. Yet The Devil in Pew Number Seven tells a different story. It is the amazing true saga of relentless persecution, one family’s faith and courage in the face of it, and a daughter whose parents taught her the power of forgiveness.
Author: Charlie Murphy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439150532
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
As one of the most popular performers on Comedy Central’s mega-hit The Chappelle Show, Charlie Murphy—older brother of comedy legend Eddie Murphy—shares his passion for comedy and tells his true Hollywood stories in this juicy and highly entertaining memoir. Once described by Chris Rock as “Eddie Murphy on acid,” Charlie Murphy has achieved fame as a recurring performer on the critically acclaimed, three-time Emmy-nominated cult sensation Chappelle’s Show on Comedy Central. Celebrated in particular for his “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories” skits, featuring hilarious renditions of Rick James and Prince, Murphy now recounts many of the actual stories that inspired these popular sketches in vivid and comical detail in Doing Time: The Making of a Stand-Up Guy. With his flare for storytelling and his distinctive and fearless voice, it’s no wonder that Charlie Murphy has been the subject of many featured stories in numerous magazines, including GQ, Essence, Rolling Stone, and he was recently listed as one of the Hottest People to Watch in Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List.” Featuring outrageous misadventures as part of his younger brother Eddie’s entourage, and hysterical encounters with numerous celebrities, Doing Time: The Making of a Stand-Up Guy is a fascinating and wildly funny chronicle from one of the most talented comedians today.
Author: Dorothy Dunnett
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307762300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 681
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Book Description
This third volume in The Lymond Chronicles, the highly renowned series of historical novels takes place in 1551, when Francis Crawford of Lymond is dispatched to embattled Malta, to assist the Knights of Hospitallers in defending the island against the Turks. But shortly the swordsman and scholar discovers that the greatest threat to the Knights lies within their own ranks, where various factions vie secretly for master.
Author: Karen Swallow Prior
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 140020626X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
With a foreword by Eric Metaxas, best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Amazing Grace. The enthralling biography of the woman writer who helped end the slave trade, changed Britain’s upper classes, and taught a nation how to read. The history-changing reforms of Hannah More affected every level of 18th-Century British society through her keen intellect, literary achievements, collaborative spirit, strong Christian principles, and colorful personality. A woman without connections or status, More took the world of British letters by storm when she arrived in London from Bristol, becoming a best-selling author and acclaimed playwright and quickly befriending the author Samuel Johnson, the politician Horace Walpole, and the actor David Garrick. Yet she was also a leader in the Evangelical movement, using her cultural position and her pen to support the growth of education for the poor, the reform of morals and manners, and the abolition of Britain’s slave trade. Fierce Convictions weaves together world and personal history into a stirring story of life that intersected with Wesley and Whitefield’s Great Awakening, the rise and influence of Evangelicalism, and convulsive effects of the French Revolution. A woman of exceptional intellectual gifts and literary talent, Hannah More was above all a person whose faith compelled her both to engage her culture and to transform it.
