For over fifty years, in radio, on multiple stages, in scores of movie soundtracks, and tête-à-tête performances with the rich and famous, Artie Kane's music has touched and inspired millions of people. His memoir is the story of a pianist, film composer, and conductor whose credits span the industry and reveal the enduring bond between a gifted musician, his piano, and the people who crowd around it. Music to My Years captures the romantic as well as the rough-hewn and unrelentingly perfectionist sides of the world of professional entertainment. For the love of music, and in quest of love through eight marriages, Artie reimagines his dreams, and with characteristic candor and acerbic wit, proves that the American landscape thrives as a place for misfits who follow their dreams to success. Music to My Years is also the story of the ever-changing world of professional entertainment, told by an artist whose talents helped to define the transformative era. This memoir will delight and inform lovers of music, fans of Hollywood culture and films, and devotees of TV shows of the last five decades. This story will resonate with anyone who has pursued a dream or struggled to find true love.

More than three decades have passed since Robert Kennedy was assassinated seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. During that time, a powerful legend has grown around him, decreeing that he would have quickly ended the Vietnam War, violence in the cities, and racial and social injustice across the land. Millions of Americans continue to believe that legend. Drawing on his striking interpretation of RFK's character, award-winning historian Ronald Steel examines the life against the legend that Kennedy consciously helped create.

The memoir of a South Asian immigrant to Canada, whose formative years in India were steeped in a reigning patriarchal culture of honour and shame, in which the burden of the family's good standing rests on the sexual purity of girls and women. The book traces the author's lonely, poignant, often risk-charged struggle to free herself from the oppressive code. As well, the book chronicles her courageous battle to help other South Asian girls and women in Canada step out of their kinsmen's ancient cultural cycle and claim their gender rights as fully equal Canadian citizens.

In an unforgettable addition to the literature of memoir, one of America’s preeminent literary scholars tells his story of coming of age in France during the buildup to the Second World War. As a Jewish youth in France during the 1930s, Victor Brombert’s heady explorations of sex and love were cut short by the rise of Nazi power and the Vichy Regime. His family narrowly escaped to New York, where Brombert joined the U.S. Army, only to return to Europe to fight on the beaches of Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. As he shuttles between the stations of his life, Brombert’s narrative recaptures the textures of childhood, the horrors of war, and his own discovery of a sustaining passion for literature. By turns melancholy and erotic, his memoir is also a meditation on memory itself, and a Proustian re-creation of a lost time and place.

You thought you knew him - from Roseanne, movies like True Lies , and now his hot seat hosting Fox Sports' hit show "The Best Damn Sports Show Period." But the face he puts forth on camera is a mere part of the true Tom Arnold - also known for deciding one night in his early 20s to streak through his small Iowa town. Young Tom didn't think it was such a blast by the end of the evening, though, when he ended up naked in the drunk tank, forced to call in "sick" to his job at Hormel, where his duties included pulling fat off hog ribs and shooting in the head pigs that couldn't make it up the electrocution conveyor. When his boss found out why he had really missed work, Tom got fired, leading his grandmother to remark, "that's a shame. That was the best job you'll ever have." Fortunately, grandmom was wrong and Tom went on to better jobs, among them roles in the movies Hero, Nine Months and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery . He has had his own 3-part HBO special, "Tom Arnold: The Naked Truth," was a writer, actor and executive producer of the acclaimed show "Roseanne," and starred in 3 television shows of his own, "The Jackie Thomas Show," "Tom," and "The Tom Show." From his midwest upbringing to his early days in comedy clubs to his successes and failures in love and Hollywood, Tom is by turns endearingly self-deprecating and brutally honest about his past. Cocaine addiction, weight problems, and his most famous relationship merit full disclosure in what is THE BEST DAMN AUTOBIOGRAPHY PERIOD!

Rumi's Untold Story is written from 30-year research by award-winning Rumi translator, scholar and author Shahram Shiva. It provides a clear record of highlights of Rumi's life and clarifies certain aspects of his very colorful history which have been kept secret from public until now. It covers Rumi's unconventional relationship with his mentor Shams and Sham's controversial and doomed marriage to Rumi's daughter Kimia. TOPICS:1. Preface2. About Rumi3. The Growing Phenomenon of Rumi4. Why Rumi? Here are 12 Reasons5. Rumi & Shams: A Love Story, Tragedy or Personal Necessity? The Untold Story6. Who was Kimia Khatun? (Kimya, Khatoon, Khatoun) 7. The Collective Poems of Shams or Rumi?8. What Really Went On Between Rumi and Shams in those Precious Several Months?9. Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and Global Artistic Perspective10. Rumi, a Pop Star Celebrity at the Time?11. Is Rumi the Inspiration for Today's Love Songs?12. Was Rumi a Sufi?13. A Rumi for All Seasons14. Rumi was Gloriously Blasphemous15. Rumi Belongs to the Whole World and Cannot Be Marginalized16. The Famed Whirling Dervishes of Turkey do not Represent Rumi, they Epitomize his Son17. Why the Academia Will Never Come Close to Understanding Rumi and Other Mystic Poets and Writers18. Rumi's Untold Story - Conclusion19. Selection of Rumi Poems with Original Persian20. Shahram Shiva's Unique & Proven 4-Step Method to Whirling21. How to Manifest Your Vision22. Understanding Mystic or Yogic Dreams23. Soul Evolution Principal: The Four Stages24. Personal Gratitude25. References26. About Shahram Shiva

In 1984, Phillip Lopate sat down with his mother, Frances, to listen to her life story. A strong, resilient, indomitable woman who lived through the major events of the twentieth century, she was orphaned in childhood, ran away and married young, and then reinvented herself as a mother, war factory worker, candy store owner, community organizer, clerk, actress, and singer. But paired with exciting anecdotes are the criticisms of the husband who couldn't satisfy her, the details of numerous affairs and sexual encounters, and, though she succeeded at many of her roles, accounts of how she always felt mistreated, taken advantage of. After the interviews, at a loss for what to do with the tapes, Lopate put them away. But thirty years later, after his mother had passed away, Lopate found himself drawn back to the recordings of this conversation. Thus begins a three-way conversation between a mother, his younger self, and the person he is today. Trying to break open the family myths, rationalizations, and self-deceptions, A Mother's Tale is about family members who love each other but who can't seem to overcome their mutual mistrust. Though Phillip is sympathizing to a point, he cannot join her in her operatic displays of self-pity and how she blames his father for everything that went wrong. His detached, ironic character has been formed partly in response to her melodramatic one. The climax is an argument in which he tries to persuade her--using logic, of all things--that he really does love her, but is only partially successful, of course. A Mother's Tale is about something primal and universal: the relationship between a mother and her child, the parent disappointed with the payback, the child, now fully grown, judgmental. The humor is in the details.

"Joseph Epstein may well be the only first-rate American literary critic who can be said to have--and deserve--fans. His essays have captivated readers with their wit, learning, and unabashed love of reading. . . .He has high standards for craftsmanship and a low tolerance for cant." --Washington Times

Take a step back in time with some of the best writers with disabilities as they recount their first adventure, their first heartbreak, and the first time the unexpected treaded into their life. From body transformations to societal setbacks, to love a airs and family trauma, Firsts collects the most thought-provoking and exciting stories of our time by people with disabilities. Contributors include Nigel David Kelly, Kimberly Gerry-Tucker, Caitlin Hernandez, Andrew Gurza, and David-Elijah Nahmod.

CHATEAUBRIAND- Poet Statesman Lover by ANDREW MAUROIS. Contents include: Introduction ix I. Childhood and Youth i II. Soldier and Voyager 3 5 III. Exile 57 IV. Le Genie du Christianisme 87 V, Journey from Paris to Andalmia 1 2 8 VI The Valley of Wolves 156 VIL The Partisan 193 VIII. The Upward Climb. The Dizzy Heights. The Fall 233 IX. The Monarchist against the Monarchy 269 X, Old Age and Second Flowering 305 ILLUSTRATIONS Chateaubriand in 1 820 frontispiece Madame Recamier facing page 55 Chateaubriand 70 Madame de Custine 135 Natalie de Labor de. Viscountess of Noailles 1 50 The Countess of Castellane 215 Portrait of Madame Recamier in later life 230 Chateaubriand, last portrait, 186* 7 278. Introduction: SEVERAL reasons have led me to apply myself to the study of Chateaubriand's life. The first was a great admiration for the writer, one of those who have exercised the most lasting and profound in fluence on French literature; the second the desire to compare a French romantic with the English romantics I had studied, and especially to find in Chateaubriand the original of which Byron was so often a copy; the third a keen interest in that strange exist ence which found itself bound up with the whole history of France throughout the most dramatic period of that history* The Old Order, the Revolution, the Empire, the Restoration, the July monarchy, Chateaubriand knew them all; he was banished by the Republic, a rival of the Emperor, a minister and afterwards an op ponent of the King; he lived in England and in America. In his time he was traveller, soldier, novelist, ambassador, religious writer and political publicist; he was loved by the most beautiful and sphinx-like woman of her age. In all this there is so much material for a biography that it is suiprising to find that Chateaubriand's has all things considered, been rarely written.

For fans of All-of-a-Kind Family , here is the true story of how Sarah Brenner, a poor girl from New York City’s Lower East Side, became Sydney Taylor: dancer, actress, and successful children’s book author. Sarah Brenner might have come from an all-of-a-kind family (five sisters who all dressed alike), but she was always one of a kind. Growing up in a Jewish immigrant family on New York’s impoverished Lower East Side, Sarah loved visiting the library, celebrating holidays with her family, and taking free dance classes at the Henry Street Settlement. But she was always aware of things that weren’t fair—whether it was that women couldn’t vote, or how girls were treated in her school, or that her parents had had to leave Europe because they were Jewish. When she grew up, Sarah changed her name to Sydney and became an actress and a dancer, but she never forgot the importance of fighting unfairness, whether it was anti-Semitism at her job or the low wages of workers. And when her daughter complained that it wasn’t fair that there were no books about Jewish children like her, Sydney put pen to paper and wrote a one-of-a-kind children’s book. From well-known Jewish children’s author Richard Michelson, this is the story of how Sarah became Sydney and how she showed children the joy of seeing their culture reflected on the page.

Missy tells all … and there is a lot to tell. First came Missy. Then came Sable, Sunny, Chyna, and the rest. Missy Hyatt was professional wrestling’s first character — the original sexy “socialite” sidekick whose trademark Gucci purse and tough-girl attitude made her the most loved — and most hated — woman in wrestling. Now, fifteen years after she first shimmied up to the ring, Missy Hyatt takes fans inside the world of wrestling. From her high school days as a hard-core fan, cheering from her living room, to the cover of Wrestler magazine, Missy has done it all. In this no-holds-barred memoir, Missy discloses the behind-the-scenes secrets of table-throwing, chair-smashing, hair-pulling, and the technique of “juicing” — how wrestlers make themselves bleed on cue. Find out about her intimate relationships with Jake the Snake, Wonder Years’ Jason Hervey, Hot Stuff Eddie Gilbert, and many many more. Missy has worked with wrestling’s biggest stars, from Hulk to Jesse, from Vince to the Rock, and she tells everything.

"Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel’s moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse—a great–grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa—through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the ""pattern and random bursts that make up a life." His book offers an intimate recollection of how one person forges a life as a writer during extraordinary times. From the Jewish quarter of Houston in the 1970s to bohemian Boston in the 1980s, from Russia’s Pale of Settlement to a farming village in Vermont, Biespiel remains alert to the magic of possibilities—ancestral journeys, hash parties, political rallies, family connections, uncertain loves, the thrill of sex, and lasting friendships. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft coupled with a classic coming–of–age tale that does for Boston in the 1980s what Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s and Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage did for Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Restless with curiosity and enthusiasm, The Education of a Young Poet is a singular and universal bildungsroman that movingly demonstrates, "in telling the story of one’s coming into consciousness, all languages are more or less the same."

A love story, a mystery, and a memory guide, Past Forgetting shows a writer's determination to re-create her life.Jill Robinson, novelist and author of Bed/Time/Story, wakes from a coma to discover she's lost her memory and just about any sense of who she was.And is. She likes the look of the man standing next to her bed, but doesn't recognize that he's her husband, Stuart. What matters is that she feels safe around him. As she searches the house for her children, she is reminded that her son and daughter are both grown with families of their own--how well did she ever know them? Can You make up for a past you don't really remember? It is Stuart who begins to fill in the details for Jill, including the fact that she's a well-known writer, although when she meets with her doctors, they say she may never write again. Against all odds, Jill Robinson retrieved her unique writing voice, and in this engaging memoir shows how she does it. She takes us with her on her exploration of'tlie connections between memory and creativity, celebrity and anonymity, and loss and discovery. From her first tentative steps outside her house on Wimpole Street to London's sleek West End. From a trip to Oxford to discuss memory with a professor to her amazing voyage to Los Angeles on an assignment for Vanity fair which takes her back to the sixties world of Hockney, Polanski, and Hopper, Jill forges new paths to memory. In Past Forgetting, Jill Robinson rediscovers friendships she doesn't know she had: Robert Redford tells her stories about her childhood; at John Lahr's London literary teas, she's reintroduced to the writer's world, and Cary Grant offers her memories of her father, Dore Schary. And being with Barbra Streisand reminds her of a time she doesn't quite remember: when her father was running MGM. In her urgent voyage to redefine herself, Jill asks all the questions you've ever asked on the nature of memory. Is recollection shadowed by emotion? Is memory an act of reinvention? Do people reinvent rather than recollect? In Past Forgetting you'll find the answers and you'll meet a writer you won't want to forget.

For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Generations of students have benefited from Hartman's generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America. Hartman treats us to a "biobibliography" of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman's unapologetic scholar's tale.

Kahn, Roger

Eleanor Farjeon first met Edward Thomas in the late autumn of 1912, when her brother invited him to tea. It was the beginning of a deep friendship between the painfully shy 31-year-old woman and the reserved writer known for his prose works and literary criticism. Though he died at the Battle of Arras in April 1917, it was a friendship which for Eleanor did not end with his death, but lived beyond it in his letters, and his poems, many of which Edward had sent to her from the trenches of the First World War for her comments. This double memoir uses Edward's letters and Eleanor's diaries and linking commentary to provide an extraordinarily candid account of their developing friendship, and of the enthusiasms they shared - both loved walking, and it was during this period that Edward first found his way into poetry. Edward was often deeply depressed, a man who found in nature something fundamental and ideal, a soldier-poet who wrote about the war in a new way, but Eleanor also shows us another side to his character, capturing moments of joy and humour. She also offers a unique account of Thomas's development as a poet, including the momentous meeting in 1913 with the American poet Robert Frost, whose encouragement led to Thomas's first poems. Thomas describes for her his family, his friendships with other writers, D H Lawrence among them, and also provides an exceptionally detailed account of his experiences in the First World War with the Artists' Rifles. Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years, was widely acclaimed on its first publication in 1958 - this second edition, published on the 80th anniversary of Thomas's death, has an introduction by Anne Harvey, a selection of Eleanor's sonnets 'To E.T.', and 'Walking Tom', a hitherto little-known poem about Edward written by Clifford Bax and Herbert Farjeon. Also included are eight pages of black and white photographs.

One day it happens: the dreaded event that will change your life forever. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened in a remote seaside cabin on a coastal Maine island—where the very isolation that makes for a perfect artist's retreat can also put life at risk. Shulman woke to find that her beloved husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same—but not the same. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes the ongoing anxieties and risks—and surprising rewards—she experiences as she reorganizes her world to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.

Meet Zelda Gamson: 87 years old, widow to a famous sociologist, still cutting her own bangs, and looking back on a life whose shape is only beginning to emerge. She, too, was a tenured professor; she's been a mother, a dancer, an activist, a householder, and an early expert in "gig work" and "code-switching" before either term was coined. In "Don't Play Like a Girl: A Midcentury Woman Leaps Into Life," Gamson tells the story of how she forged her own path even when her choices were limited and her way unclear. From getting pepper-sprayed at a Vietnam War protest to being drugged without her consent during the birth of her first child to finding her bliss alone on an island, Gamson shares a funny, harrowing, lively tale with an intimate perspective on universal questions. How can we give to others while still holding onto our essential selves? What should young women now understand about how quickly their right to self-determination can vanish? How do we live with joy amidst turmoil? Wise and warm, "Don't Play Like a Girl" offers a relevant, instructive vision for a contemporary world that demands unprecedented improvisation. People of her generation and her fellow academics, activists, and fun-lovers will return to their youth with Zelda Gamson. Young women and young men will love and learn with an elder who still feels like they do.