This memoir, a young poet's tragicomic account of crossed loves and rebellions as he grows from boy to man under the vigilant eyes of the state in the Soviet Union between the 1950s and 1970s, can be approached as a bildungsroman. It is set in Tallinn, Riga and Moscow (with episodes in Uzbekistan, Moldavia, and the Ukraine) and, apart from this author's own story, deals with the experiences of young people of that period, their friendships and attempts to form erotic/romantic attachments, as well as their search for national--Baltic, Jewish, Russian--identity while being watched and sometimes interrogated by the secret police. It also includes some reconstruction of the author's family history: expulsion from Spain, the Magician of Prague, the renowned historian Simon Dubnov. The volume progresses from the demonstration of two seven-year-old boys' against Stalin and Lenin, in Tallinn, in the mid-1950s to a dramatic and doomed love affair with a woman married to an army colonel who attempts to shoot the author as the latter is about to make his final exit from the country, with the KGB on his tail, in the early 1970s. While raising a number of important historical and contemporary issues, the memoir is also an involving narrative, a visually descriptive story, varied and engrossing, involving philosophical, theological, and detective elements; popular and literary culture; countries and languages; high seriousness and undercutting irony.

The autobiography of the former governor and senator from Alaska. 564 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Liveright Publishing Corporation (ISBN 0871405652).

" A no-holds-barred memoir that charts the rise and fall - and rise - of one of Australia's most iconic music performers. You think you know Deborah Conway? You think seeing her striding and scowling down Sydney's back streets in an oversize coat or galavanting around a golf course wearing a close approximation of plus fours means you know who Deborah Conway is? She figures you probably don't know the half of it. And there's a lot to know. If you have listened to any of Deborah Conway's songs and were half curious about the origins; if you have ever wondered whatever happened to that chick who covered herself in Nutella and was photographed shovelling cream cakes in to her mouth; if you gave a nanosecond of thought to whose bare arse adorned the giant Billboard ads for Bluegrass jeans in the 1980's and how much someone could get paid to do that; if you liked Tracey Mann's vocals in The Takeaways but asked yourself, ""did she really sing them?""; if you were a movie buff who thought Running On Empty was a classic BEFORE it became a cult phenomenon and need behind the scenes gossip, now's your chance to find out all this and so much more. Conway pulls back the curtain on the fevered world of a 1980's post punk band, the spectacular rise and fall and rise of one of the more obstreperous women working inside Australia's music industry, a woman who has straddled the high arts and the low without losing her footing or her mind and whose fierce independence has seen her produce her best work. Book Of Life : the good, the bad, and the ugly of being alive in the 20th and 21st centuries from the vantage point of a music insider (and outsider) with a deep need to tell the truth about it all. "

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Fair, Book very good; jacket has some tears to edges.

Oswaldo Pay was seven years old when Fidel Castro seized power, promising to create a 'free, democratic, and just Cuba'. But Castro instead created an authoritarian regime and crushed all dissent. The dream of democracy became Pay's life work. Sent to Castro's forced labour camps, he could not stay silent, and formed a pro-democracy movement. After receiving multiple death threats, Pay was killed in a suspicious car accident in 2012. Democracy is in retreat all over the world. Oswaldo Pay showed how to fight for it. His battle was waged from the streets of Havana but carried universal truths. Pulitzer Prize-winner David E. Hoffman, author of the acclaimed The Billion Dollar Spy, tells the compelling story of a courageous dissident in action.

“Laws are like sausages,” Otto von Bismarck is said to have remarked. “It is better not to see them being made.” Even among sausage factories, New York State’s legislature is notoriously dysfunctional, but as Tales from the Sausage Factory reminds us, this was not always the case. Indeed, in the early 1980s, New York’s legislature was a model of professionalism. Cowritten by former state legislator Daniel Feldman and political scientist Gerald Benjamin, Tales from the Sausage Factory offers an up-close look at how law and public policy are made in New York State. Drawing on Feldman’s experiences as a member of the New York State Assembly from 1981 to 1998, the book focuses on four major battles over public safety policy in the 1980s and 1990s—organized crime control, the Rockefeller drug laws, sex offender notification, and gun control. Not afraid to name names along the way, Feldman and Benjamin show how politics works in New York State and how major public policy questions are decided (both in the legislature and the courts), as well as how New York’s legislature might rise above its present dysfunction to recover the professionalism it once had. At a time when frustration with at state government is at an all-time high, Tales from the Sausage Factory is a much-needed reminder of what we can—and should—expect from our state legislators.

The name of Cyril Ornadel may not be known to many outside the musical theatre. The back of his head, however, was for many years the most famous on television, for Cyril Ornadel was the conductor in the orchestra pit for ITV's immensely popular programme, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. But this efficient and unassuming man was the musical director for numerous West End 'hit' shows: Kismet, Call Me Madam, Pal Joey, Wonderful Town, The King and I and My Fair Lady, to name but a few. He is also a composer in his own right. His song 'Portrait of My Love' is a standard, known and loved by an entire generation, while 'If I Ruled the World' from Pickwick, the musical he wrote with Wolf Mankowitz and Leslie Bricusse, became a world-class hit and turned into what was virtually the late Sir Harry Secombe's theme tune. Now, in this rich and illuminating memoir, Cyril Ornadel shares the fruits of his experience in almost every aspect of the music business - theatre, films, recording, composing, orchestrating, conducting, producing. With wit, wisdom and humility he candidly discusses the triumphs and disasters of his lifelong love affair with Show Business.

When Cosmo Landesman's American parents decided to move their young family to London in the swinging sixties, it was not to pursue a quieter life on this side of the pond. Quite the reverse: it was out of unbridled, unashamed lust for fame and fortune. But things did not go according to plan, and as a child Cosmo found himself charged with raising his starstruck parents and trying to cope with the publicity stunt of their 'open marriage'. Over the years he wrote press releases, blurbs and proposals for their plays, film treatments, novels, book ideas and demo tapes. He found himself playing the roll of creative midwife, personal manager, publicist, psychoanalyst and apologist. Not any more. In this hilarious memoir he finally lays bare his extraordinary childhood and the twists and turns of his parents' bizarre desire for the spotlight - and how they were always doomed to failure.

"An autobiographical narrative of the career of British author, bookseller, and book collector Colin Franklin, discussing his life and experiences in the book world. Includes essays on figures in the book trade who have influenced and fascinated Franklin. Illustrated in color and black and white"--