"A compelling read, sad and wistful and breathtakingly forthright." —Chicago Magazine Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg loved his job, his wife, and his two young sons. But he also loved to drink. Drunkard is an unflinchingly honest account of one man's descent into alcoholism and his ambivalent struggle to embrace sobriety. Sentenced to an outpatient rehab program, Steinberg discovers that twenty-eight days of therapy cannot reverse the toll taken by decades of hard drinking. As Steinberg claws his way through recovery, grieves the loss of the drink, and tries to shore up his faltering marriage, he is confronted by the greatest test he has ever faced, and finds himself in the process. Steinberg's gripping memoir is a frank and often painfully funny account of the stark-yet-common realities of a disease that affects millions.

Through The Years: An Autobiography is a memoir written by Nathan S. Jonas, detailing his life from childhood to adulthood. The book offers a comprehensive account of Jonas' experiences, including his upbringing, education, career, and personal life. It covers his early years growing up in a small town, his academic pursuits, and his eventual rise to success in his chosen field. The book also delves into his personal relationships, including his marriage and family life. Throughout the book, Jonas reflects on the challenges he faced and the lessons he learned, offering readers a unique perspective on his life and the world around him. The book is a compelling read for anyone interested in personal memoirs and the journey of self-discovery.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

"Whenever women are honest about their struggles, they give other women a gift. Mia delivers." Elizabeth GilbertThis book is for every woman who's been told success is as simple as Lean In, Say Yes, Live Your Best Life, Beat Your Fear, Follow Your Dream... and then feel #soblessed.It's for guilty friends, bad mums, crap wives, imperfect feminists, rebellious daughters and any girl with a big mouth and at least one foot in it. It's for any woman who's ever asked: 'Am I the only one who isn't quite coping?'Here is Mia Freedman's low road to the top - a fearless, hilarious, inspiring and surprising collection of modern misadventures to read, relate to and rejoice in, then share with all the women in your life.MORE PRAISE FOR MIA FREEDMAN"Funny, raw, fierce and - at heart - profoundly generous." Annabel Crabb"There are few writers in Australia who care as much about what makes women tick as Mia Freedman and who reveal so much of themselves." Leigh Sales"Mia Freedman is one of the most inspirational, informative and accessible voices among contemporary Australian writers ... She is dedicated to improving the lives of other women. Hers is an important unique voice in our national conversation." Cate McGregor

HAVE YOU EVER MET A CHILD WHO TALKED LIKE AN ADULT? Who knew big words and knew how to use them? Was he a charmer or an insufferable smart aleck—or maybe both? Mark Oppenheimer was just such a boy, his talent for language a curse as much as a blessing. Unlike math or music prodigies, he had no way to showcase his unique skill, except to speak like a miniature adult—a trick some found impressive but others found irritating. Frustrated and isolated, Oppenheimer used his powers for ill—he became a wisenheimer—pushing his peers and teachers away, acting out with prank phone calls, and worse. But when he got to high school, Oppenheimer discovered an outlet for his loquaciousness: the debate team. This smart, funny memoir not only reveals a strange, compelling subculture, it offers a broader discussion of the splendor and power (including the healing power) of language and of the social and developmental hazards of being a gifted child. Oppenheimer’s journey from loneliness to fulfillment affords a fascinating inside look at the extraordinary subculture of world-class high-school debate and at the power of language to change one’s life.

Search-Cover"I was four years old when my father came back to kidnap me," begins this gripping memoir about Matousek's search for James Matousek, the drifter father he never knew. Described by the New York Times as " part reminiscence, part detective story, part spiritual musing," this memoir is more than the story of one man's search for his father; it is also a look at the meaning of life and how fathers contribute to that meaning. Growing up in a family of troubled women (Matousek's sister committed suicide when the author was 29), he describes the turmoil of growing up "fatherless in America" - an experience shared by millions of children in what sociologists have called the Age of the Absent Father - and the difficult, ultimately successful, struggle to figure out what being a man really means in an age of shifting definitions, evolving sexuality, and "breaking out the man box" of stereotyping and patriarchy. With the tension of a mystery story, the climax occurs when Matousek meets a man he believes to be his father. But is he? And does Matousek, who has reconciled with his mother as she lay dying, really care? These are just two questions leading to this memoir's surprising conclusion. Praise for The Boy He Left Behind "Mark Matousek's memoir The Boy He Left Behind begins with the gripping sentence, 'I was four years old when my father came back to kidnap.' Part reminiscence, part detective story, part spiritual musing, the book is more than the story of one man's search for his father, it is also a look at the meaning of life and how fathers contribute to that meaning." -The New York Times Book Review "This thoughtful and lovingly rendered portrait of an American childhood is a refreshing addition to the genre. Matousek not only tells his own story but brilliantly evokes the troubled lives of his mother and sisters with humor, honesty, and above all, compassion." -Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace "A riveting story in the hands of a master storyteller. Mark Matousek has written a family memoir that is tight and revealing. This is one fine book." -James McBride, author of The Color of Water "[A] searing memoir....The writing is exhilarating...deeply soulful, compassionate, and self-scrutinizing. It is an explosive memoir filled with prose that sings, one that provokes readers to question where we come from and what our places are in this world. Matousek...writes from the heart. Read this book" -Los Angeles Magazine "Matousek's account of his search for the father he hadn't seen since he was four [is] sharp and funny, thanks to the punchy dialogue and dead-on character sketches." -Elle "Interweaving the frustrating suspenseful search for his long-lost father with unsparing recollections of a fatherless boyhood and his confrontation with a life-threatening disease, Mark Matousek expertly guides you through the particulars of his life into a harrowing meditation on the difficulties of becoming a man in a country without fathers. The Boy He Left Behind is beautifully crafted, artful and inspiring. It merits a place alongside the late Paul Monette's masterwork, Becoming a Man; Half a Life Story. Like Monette, Matousek's triumph is twofold - In the book he has written, and in the man he has become. Matousek's probing memoir of lost childhood and found history celebrates the power of manhood." -The Utne Reader "Mark Matousek has produced [a] riveting account of his search-at age 38, with the help of a private detective-for the father who abandoned him at age four. A searing meditation on the psychic harm suffered by men and women without fathers, this wise odyssey wrestles with questions of life and death and the search for the meaning of one's existence." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A father and son travel across North America in a pick-up truck--talking, laughing, fighting, and bonding. After years of thinking he'd never have kids, Lee Gutkind became a father at forty-seven and, following his divorce, soon found himself taking over more and more of the primary care responsibilities for his son, Sam. As one of a growing number of "old new dads" (recent studies have shown that one in ten children are born to fathers over forty), Gutkind realized that he faced challenges-both mental and physical-not faced by younger dads, not the least of which was how to bond with a son who was so much younger than himself. For the past five years, Gutkind's approach to this challenge has been to spend several weeks of every summer "truckin'" with Sam, a term they define as a metaphor for spontaneity, a lack of restriction: "Truckin' means that you can what you want to do sometimes; you don't always need to do what's expected." What began as long, cross-country journeys in a pick-up truck, including one memorable trip up the Alaska-Canadian Highway en route to a writer's conference in Homer, Alaska, have in more recent years ranged farther afield, to Europe, Australia, and Tibet. Whether listening to rock and roll music, entertaining themselves with their secret jokes and code words, fishing for halibut, or fighting over tuna fish sandwiches and how best to butter one's toast, Lee and Sam have learned to respect one another. In the process of their travels and their adventures, Lee has also come to grips with the downside of middle age and the embarassment of "senior moments," while Sam has inevitably begun to assert himself and shape his own life. Interspersed with Sam's own observations and journal entries, Truckin' with Sam is an honest, moving, and often hilarious account of one father's determination to bond with his son, a spontaneous travelogue that will appeal to old dads, new dads, and women who want to know more about how dads (and sons) think and behave.

Judy Cassab is one of Australia's best known portrait painters and the winner of many prestigious art awards, including the coveted Archibald Prize. In Judy Cassab Diaries , the artist tells the story of a life lived passionately and to the fullest. It is a rich, fascinating and inspirational self-portrait of a courageous and vital woman, whose determination to live shines through her writing.

In her award-winning book Harmful to Minors , Judith Levine radically upended our fixed ideas about childhood. Now, she tackles the other end of life in this poignant memoir of a daughter coming to terms with a difficult father who is sinking into dementia, presenting an insightful exploration of the ways we think about disability, aging, and the self as it resides in the body and the world. In prose that is unsentimental yet moving, serious yet darkly funny, complex in emotion and ideas yet spare in diction, Levine reassembles her father's personal and professional history even as he is losing track of it. She unpeels the layers of his complicated personality and uncovers information that surprises even her mother, to whom her father has been married for more than sixty years. As her father deteriorates, the family consensus about who he was and is and how best to care for him constantly threatens to collapse. Levine recounts the painful discussions, mad outbursts, and gingerly negotiations, and dissects the shifting alliances among family, friends, and a changing guard of hired caretakers. Spending more and more time with her father, she confronts a relationship that has long felt bereft of love. By caring for his needs, she learns to care about and, slowly, to love him. While Levine chronicles these developments, she looks outside her family for the sources of their perceptions and expectations, deftly weaving politics, science, history, and philosophy into their personal story. A memoir opens up to become a critique of our culture's attitudes toward the elderley. A claustrophobic account of Alzheimer's is transformed into a complex lesson about love, duty, and community. What creates a self and keeps it whole? Levine insists that only the collaboration of others can safeguard her father's self against the riddling of his brain. Embracing interdependence and vulnerability, not autonomy and productivity, as the seminal elements of our humanity, Levine challenges herself and her readers to find new meaning, even hope, in one man's mortality and our own.

Attractive and successful, Joie Davidow presents a confident face to the world. But her carefully applied makeup conceals a secret she has kept for decades. Marked for Life chronicles Joie's struggle to overcome feeling that she was grotesquely flawed, while hiding behind a cosmetic mask that granted her entry into a profession that puts a premium on appearance, culminating in the life-changing realization that in deceiving others, she was also betraying herself. Written with humor and refreshingly devoid of self-pity, it will touch anyone who has ever felt "different" from the rest of the world.

By the time my fortieth birthday loomed, I'd married, had two kids, left the country of my birth for another and picked up plenty of baggage along the path. I was long overdue for a spiritual spring-clean. But I couldn't very well take a year off to meditate in an ashram. Who was going to make the lunchboxes? So instead, I opted for doing something about the fatty deposits on my rear-end before they fossilized. And that's where this story begins. Or so I thought. *** A photo of herself in a bikini on her son's fifth birthday led Joanne Fedler to take stock of her life. How had she reached a point where she could barely look at her own body without cringing? Armed only with the certainty that she did not want to be 'fat and forty' Joanne decided it was time to get rid of the excess weight she'd been carrying for far too long. While on a strict new eating plan in which she radically changed her relationship with food, Joanne began to see it wasn't only pounds she needed to lose, but the weight of fear, guilt and anxiety she was lugging around in her heart. In making friends with hunger and dropping a few dress sizes, Joanne found greater peace not only with her body, but with herself, her life and her adopted country. What began as a mission to get back into a bikini became a journey towards acceptance, proving that a spiritual journey can start by saying 'no' to the chocolate mousse. When Hungry, Eat is a celebration of unexpected spiritual insight, small portions and the gifts of hunger.

Every extra pound tells a story . . . At five four and 230 pounds, film critic Jami Bernard took the plunge into what she half-jokingly calls "the heart of darkness"- her innermost self, where, by confronting a past both funny and painful, she was able to let go of those pounds, one by one, week after week. At the end of this intensely personal, bitterly humorous journey, she had lost seventy-five of them. Jami chronicled her weight loss in the New York Daily News , where she was a film critic for thirteen years. This book goes behind the scenes to tell the unvarnished truth of what it's like to live large in a body-obsessed culture that takes no prisoners. Here is the reality of weight loss: a stock-market chart of crazy gains and losses, a crumb trail of doomed relationships, the terrors of pleasure, and the best pizza this side of Naples. With a sharp wit and the confident, easy style that makes her a nationally known critic and champion of women's issues, Jami candidly explores the secret world of fat people-their fears, bodies, clothing; their forbidden love affair with food; and what it's like to leave that all behind and emerge thin again on the other side. Moving, sometimes shocking, and always mordantly funny, The Incredible Shrinking Critic takes it all off-seventy-five pounds and counting.

Paris, France is a memoir written by Gertrude Stein and published in 1940 on the day that Paris fell to Germany during World War II. The book blends Stein's childhood memories with a commentary on French people and culture; is a memoir written in a "stream of consciousness" style. It is interpreted as Gertrude Stein's personal view of France as a country, and the French people. She observes the French eating, drinking, crossing the street, and carrying out their day in no other way that deviates from their "Frenchness." The word "French" quickly becomes a state of being or state of existence.

Who better to give us the message that we can all stay vibrant, exuberant, engaged, involved, and relevant than the world's most recognizable Noo Yawker, the man who, perhaps more than anyone else, has come to epitomize the active, with-it, no-quit, in-your-face, gritty New York spirit: the Honorable Edward I. Koch? In this lively primer, the colorful three-term mayor of New York City and noted television and radio personality, columnist, and commentator, offers anecdotal evidence to suggest that the healthiest outlook on advancing age is to keep active at the work you love.

Born in Vienna in 1936, David Pryce-Jones is the son of the well-known writer and editor of the Times Literary Supplement Alan Pryce-Jones and Therese "Poppy" Fould-Springer. He grew up in a cosmopolitan mix of industrialists, bankers, soldiers, and playboys on both sides of a family, embodying the fault lines of the title: "not quite Jewish and not quite Christian, not quite Austrian and not quite French or English, not quite heterosexual and not quite homosexual, socially conventional but not quite secure." Graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, David Pryce-Jones served as Literary Editor of the Financial Times and the Spectator, a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph , and Senior Editor of National Review . Fault Lines is a memoir that spans Europe, America, and the Middle East and encompasses figures ranging from Somerset Maugham to Svetlana Stalin to Elie de Rothschild. As seen on Channel 4's My Grandparents' War , with Helena Bonham Carter, the memoir has the storytelling power of Pryce-Jones's numerous novels and non-fiction books, and is perceptive and poignant testimony to the fortunes and misfortunes of the present age.

Just Say Yes, perhaps the first marijuana memoir ever published, is a positive account of long-term cannabis use. With ruthless honesty and deadpan humor, the author observes the effect of weed upon every aspect of her life: marriage, motherhood, friendship, work, sport, sex. As John Updike wrote about Hiller's short story collection, Skin, this is "good, brave and joyful writing." Ten years after its first publication, the updated edition of Just Say Yes addresses the changing status of cannabis in America and includes a foreword by Steve DeAngelo. "This funny, wry and very candid memoir purports to be a Confession of an American Pot-Smoker but is really a cultural/personal history of the past fifty years. The narrative progresses backward, and not only the past but innocence itself is recaptured." -Phillip Lopate, Nonfiction Director, MFA Writing Program, Columbia University "Likely to loosen up fellow smokers, while adding a personal take to the public discussion of cannabis." -Kirkus Reviews "Brilliant, important, and beautifully written." -Betsy Prioleau, author of Seductress and Swoon

Dr. Bernard Lown conveys in this book the excitement of the occasion, including the famous incident when a member of the audience had a heart attack and the two cardiologists, Lown and Chazov, worked together to resuscitate the man.

"A rapturous, witty, and passionate memoir ... Violin Dreams is not only the story of a man becoming an artist, it’s a history of twentieth-century music.” -- John Guare, Tony Award-winning playwright Arnold Steinhardt, for more than forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument. His story is rich with vivid scenes: the terror inflicted by his early violin teachers, the sensual pleasure involved in the pursuit of the perfect violin, the charged atmosphere of high-level competitions. Steinhardt describes Bach’s Chaconne as the holy grail for the solo violin, and he illuminates, from the perspective of an ardent owner of a great Storioni violin, the history and mysteries of the renowned Italian violinmakers. Violin Dreams includes a remarkable CD recording of Steinhardt performing Bach’s Partita in D Minor as a young violinist forty years ago and playing the same piece especially for this book. A conversation between the author and Alan Alda on the differences between the two performances is included in the liner notes.

From the bestselling author of The Red Tent and Good Harbor , a collection of intimate, autobiographical reflections on the milestones, revelations, and balancing acts of life as a wife, mother, friend, and member of a religious community. Before The Red Tent won her international literary acclaim, Anita Diamant was a columnist in Boston. Over the course of twenty years, she wrote essays that reflected the shape and evolution of her life, as well as the trends of her generation. In the end, her musings about love and marriage, birth and death, nature versus nurture, politics and religion—and everything from female friendships to quitting smoking—have created a public diary of the progress of her life that resonated deeply with her readers. Now, Pitching My Tent collects the finest columns of a writer who is a reporter by training and a storyteller by heart, all revised and enriched with new material. Personal, inspiring, and often funny, Pitching My Tent displays the warmth, humor, and wisdom that Diamant's legions of fans have come to cherish.

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.

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