Tuco and the Scattershot World

Tuco and the Scattershot World PDF Author: Brian Brett
Publisher: Greystone Books
ISBN: 1771640642
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The acclaimed author’s memoir of life with an African grey parrot offers “a thoughtful and generous celebration of minds and bodies different from our own” (Times Literary Supplement, UK). For thirty years, Brian Brett shared his office and his life with Tuco, a remarkable parrot given to asking questions such as “Whaddya know?” and announcing “Party time!” when guests showed up at Brett’s farm. Although Brett bought Tuco on a whim, he gradually realized the enormous obligation he has to his pet, learning that the parrot is far more complex than he thought. In Tuco and the Scattershot World, Brett not only chronicles his fascinating relationship with Tuco, but uses it to explore the human tendency to “other” the world, abusing birds, landscapes, and each other. Brett sees in Tuco’s otherness a mirror of his own experience contending with Kallman syndrome, a rare genetic condition that made him the target of bullies—and nurtured his affinity for winged creatures. Brett’s meditative digressions touch on topics ranging from the history of birds and dinosaurs to our concepts of knowledge, language, and intelligence—and include commentary from Tuco himself. By turns provocative and deeply moving, Tuco and the Scattershot World “is not a straight memoir—it’s something much more wondrously weird . . . a view of the human predicament that is hilarious, sobering and profound” (Globe & Mail, UK).

Tuco and the Scattershot World

Tuco and the Scattershot World PDF Author: Brian Brett
Publisher: Greystone Books
ISBN: 1771640642
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
The acclaimed author’s memoir of life with an African grey parrot offers “a thoughtful and generous celebration of minds and bodies different from our own” (Times Literary Supplement, UK). For thirty years, Brian Brett shared his office and his life with Tuco, a remarkable parrot given to asking questions such as “Whaddya know?” and announcing “Party time!” when guests showed up at Brett’s farm. Although Brett bought Tuco on a whim, he gradually realized the enormous obligation he has to his pet, learning that the parrot is far more complex than he thought. In Tuco and the Scattershot World, Brett not only chronicles his fascinating relationship with Tuco, but uses it to explore the human tendency to “other” the world, abusing birds, landscapes, and each other. Brett sees in Tuco’s otherness a mirror of his own experience contending with Kallman syndrome, a rare genetic condition that made him the target of bullies—and nurtured his affinity for winged creatures. Brett’s meditative digressions touch on topics ranging from the history of birds and dinosaurs to our concepts of knowledge, language, and intelligence—and include commentary from Tuco himself. By turns provocative and deeply moving, Tuco and the Scattershot World “is not a straight memoir—it’s something much more wondrously weird . . . a view of the human predicament that is hilarious, sobering and profound” (Globe & Mail, UK).

Trauma Farm

Trauma Farm PDF Author: Brian Brett
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
ISBN: 1926812387
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The acclaimed author transforms a single day on his small farm into a “gorgeously thoughtful meditation on the natural world” and our place in it (Vancouver Sun). The acclaimed poet and author Brian Brett takes readers on an irreverent and illuminating journey through a day in the life of his small island farm in British Columbia, affectionately named Trauma Farm. With fascinating ruminations on everything from the natural history of farming to the horrors of industrial slaughterhouses, Brett’s day of tending to his farm becomes a Joycean epic of agrarian life. Brett moves from the tending of livestock, poultry, orchards, gardens, machinery, and fields to the social intricacies of rural communities and, finally, to an encounter with a magnificent deer in the silver moonlight of a magical field. Brett understands both tall tales and rigorous science as he explores the small mixed farm—meditating on the perfection of the egg and the nature of soil while also offering a scathing critique of agribusiness. Whether discussing the uses and misuses of gates, examining the energy of seeds, or bantering with his family, farm hands, and neighbors, Brett remains aware of the miracles of life, birth, and death that confront the rural world every day. Trauma Farm was a 2009 book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement and the Globe & Mail, and winner of Writers’ Trust Canadian Non-Fiction Prize.

Uproar's Your Only Music

Uproar's Your Only Music PDF Author: Brian Brett
Publisher: Exile Editions, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781550960204
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
This memoir is personal and intense, a vision that is half paradise, half abattoir. It is Brett telling of growing up in the shadow of his peg-legged, strongman potato-peddling father, as he reveals that he is a hermaphrodite - sometimes angelic in his insights and also physically powerful, yet always on the brink of dying. Through excruciating pain in his bones and drug-induced hallucinations, he has stayed alive into his middle years as a storyteller with a huge appetite for life and words - a man of brilliance and courage, who has confronted the essential questions and conundrums of existence.

The Spawning Grounds

The Spawning Grounds PDF Author: Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0345810821
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The long-awaited new novel by the two-time Giller-shortlisted author is full of the qualities Gail Anderson-Dargatz's fans love: it's an intimate family saga rooted in the Thompson-Shuswap region of British Columbia, and saturated with the history of the place. A bold new story that bridges Native and white cultures across a bend in a river where the salmon run. On one side of the river is a ranch once owned by Eugene Robertson, who came in the gold rush around 1860, and stayed on as a homesteader. On the other side is a Shuswap community that has its own tangled history with the river--and the whites. At the heart of the novel are Hannah and Brandon Robertson, teenagers who have been raised by their grandfather after they lost their mother. As the novel opens, the river is dying, its flow reduced to a trickle, and Hannah is carrying salmon past the choke point to the spawning grounds while her childhood best friend, Alex, leads a Native protest against the development further threatening the river. When drowning nearly claims the lives of both Hannah's grandfather and her little brother, their world is thrown into chaos. Hannah, Alex, and most especially Brandon come to doubt their own reality as they are pulled deep into Brandon's numinous visions, which summon the myths of Shuswap culture and tragic family stories of the past. The novel hovers beautifully in the fluid boundary between past and present, between the ordinary world and the world of the spirit, all disordered by the human and environmental crises that have knit the white and Native worlds together in love, and hate, and tragedy for 150 years. Can Hannah and her brother, and Alex, find a way forward that will neither destroy the river nor themselves?

You Will Not Have My Hate

You Will Not Have My Hate PDF Author: Antoine Leiris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735222142
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - "On Friday night you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate." On November 13, 2015, Antoine Leiris’s wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, was killed by terrorists while attending a rock concert at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in the deadliest attack on France since World War II. Three days later, Leiris wrote an open letter addressed directly to his wife’s killers, which he posted on Facebook. He refused to be cowed or to let his seventeen-month-old son’s life be defined by Hélène’s murder. He refused to let the killers have their way: “For as long as he lives, this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom.” Instantly, that short Facebook post caught fire, and was reported on by newspapers and television stations all over the world. In his determination to honor the memory of his wife, he became an international hero to everyone searching desperately for a way to deal with the horror of the Paris attacks and the grim shadow cast today by the threat of terrorism. Now Leiris tells the full story of his grief and struggle. You Will Not Have My Hate is a remarkable, heartbreaking, and, indeed, beautiful memoir of how he and his baby son, Melvil, endured in the days and weeks after Hélène’s murder. With absolute emotional courage and openness, he somehow finds a way to answer that impossible question: how can I go on? He visits Hélène’s body at the morgue, has to tell Melvil that Mommy will not be coming home, and buries the woman he had planned to spend the rest of his life with. Leiris’s grief is terrible, but his love for his family is indomitable. This is the rare and unforgettable testimony of a survivor, and a universal message of hope and resilience. Leiris confronts an incomprehensible pain with a humbling generosity and grandeur of spirit. He is a guiding star for us all in these perilous times. His message—hate will be vanquished by love—is eternal.

The Secret Poisoner

The Secret Poisoner PDF Author: Linda Stratmann
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300219547
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
“This fine social history charts the changing patterns of using poison” and the forensic methods developed to detect it in the Victorian Era (The Guardian, UK). Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in some ways even defined the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann’s dark and splendid social history reveals the nineteenth century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with scientific and legal authorities who strove to detect poisons, control their availability, and bring the guilty to justice. Separating fact from Hollywood fiction, Stratmann corrects many misconceptions about particular poisons and their deadly effects. She also documents how the motives for poisoning—which often involved domestic unhappiness—evolved as marriage and child protection laws began to change. Combining archival research with vivid storytelling, Stratmann charts the era’s inexorable rise of poison cases.

What the Dog Knows

What the Dog Knows PDF Author: Cat Warren
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451667329
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Published in hardcover as What the dog knows: the science and wonder of working dogs by Simon & Schuster, New York, c2013.

Home is Burning

Home is Burning PDF Author: Dan Marshall
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1473624320
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
'An incredibly personal story ... sad, but unbelievably funny' - Claudia Winkleman, BBC Radio 2 Arts Show 'This memoir is gasp-out-loud, offensively funny, touching and a sure thing for anyone who likes David Sedaris - but with more Mormons' - Red At twenty-five, Dan left his 'spoiled white asshole' life in Los Angeles to look after his dying parents in Salt Lake City, Utah. His mother, who had already been battling cancer on and off for close to 15 years, had taken a turn for the worse. His father, a devoted marathon runner and adored parent, had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease which was quickly eroding his body. Dan's four siblings were already home, caring for their parents and resenting Dan for not doing the same. Home is Burning tells the story of Dan's year at home in Salt Lake City, as he reunites with his eclectic family -the only non-Mormon family of seven in the entire town - all of them trying their best to be there for the father who had always been there for them.

The Cyber Effect

The Cyber Effect PDF Author: Mary Aiken
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
ISBN: 0812997859
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
"From one of the world's leading experts in cyberpsychology--a discipline that combines psychology, forensics, and technology--comes a groundbreaking exploration of the impact of technology on human behavior. In the first book of its kind, Mary Aiken applies her expertise in cyber-behavioral analysis to a range of subjects, including criminal activity on the Deep Web and Darknet; deviant behavior; Internet addictions; the impact of technology on the developing child; teenagers and the Web; cyber-romance and cyber-friendships; cyberchondria; the future of artificial intelligence; and the positive effects on our digital selves, such as online altruism"--

The Colour of Bones in a Stream

The Colour of Bones in a Stream PDF Author: Brian Brett
Publisher: Sono NIS Press
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description