74 results for "Memoir"

Sobibor

Michael LEV
Sobibor traces the life of Berek (later Bernard) Schlesinger from his Polish shtetl childhood to his life during the Holocaust - hiding in the woods, finding refuge with non-Jews, confinement in Sobibor, escape during the uprising, working with partisans' documents. A physician after the war, he follows a relentless, unfulfilled pursuit of retribution for Nazi war criminals through the courts. The Sobibor uprising and its leaders, Alexander Pechersky, are pivotal to the novel. The author, Michael Lev, a product of Soviet Jewish culture, avoids loud rhetoric and heroic pathos, keeping the narration within the limits of realism. A flowing, masterful read.
Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp 2020-03-08 296 pages

My Friends' Secrets

Joan Collins
Candid, practical, and fun, My Friends Secrets is the fascinating follow-up to Joan Collins best-selling Health, Youth and Happiness: My Secrets. Now the ever-glamorous star talks with some of the world s most successful and beautiful women Angie Dickinson, Michelle Phillips, Joan Rivers, Ivanna Trump, Shirley MacLaine, Diahann Carroll, Shakira Caine, Twiggy all of whom share their secrets for maintaining a youthful appearance and living life to the fullest. With an instructive practical section pulling together celebrity advice on skin care, diet, health, exercise, make-up, alternative therapies, exercise, and cosmetic surgery My Friends Secrets dispels the negative image of aging and encourages you to have the time of your life.
Carlton Books, Limited 1999-05

It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote

Bruce Vilanch
"Bruce Vilanch, a storyteller without peer, has written a tell-all . . . on himself! And it's hilarious! He's finally coming clean and owning up to his part in creating some of the worst television of the twentieth century, and that's saying a lot. There's no one like him. As they've been saying since I discovered him as a cub reporter at the Chicago Tribune , when you're in a pinch . . . Get Bruce!" --BETTE MIDLER Bruce Vilanch is known as a go-to comedy writer for award shows, sitcoms, and over-the-top variety specials, but he has also been responsible for quite a few of the most legendary disasters ever made. Some of his work lives in infamy-- The Star Wars Holiday Special , The Paul Lynde Halloween Special , Rob Lowe dancing with Snow White at the Oscars, and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour . How did these ever seem like a good idea? Well, everyone has screwed up a few times, or had their work screwed up by others. It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time is a lifetime reflection of what Vilanch has experienced, learned, and forgotten in decades of working in show business, specifically the south forty acres known as comedy. It involves very famous people and people who were not very famous but should have been. It explains to the people in the audience who say to themselves, once they have gotten their jaw off the floor, "'How did this ever get made?" Don't we all want to know?
Chicago Review Press, Incorporated 2026-06-02 208 pages

The Happy Hooker

Hollander, Xaviera
From uptight Afrikaners to flying Dutchmen, from New York high-fliers to the earthy charmers of Puerto Rico--Xaviera got a taste of them all, first as a freewheeling freelance, and later as the most beautiful, famous, and merry madam of Manhattan. "The Happy Hooker" is the book that launched the high priestess of hookerdom on an unsuspecting world. And although this frank sexual shocker raised eyebrows on first publication, Xaviera didn't tell all! This revised version of her internationally bestselling autobiography reveals what modesty forbade--and really takes the lid off the bedtime habits of an astonishing variety of men--and women--in the sin capitals of the world, detailing Xaviera's penetrating personal insights into men and their morals.
Buccaneer Books 1979-02-01 311 pages

When Einstein met Kafka: Jewish contributions to the modern world

Moldes, Diego,Capsuto, Steven
"In April 1911, Prague artists, writers, and intellectuals often gathered nightly at the Café Louvre, an intellectual center where music was played and high-level discussions were held. Many of the attendees were German-speaking Jews, such as Franz Kafka and his faithful friend Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Oskar Kraus, Franz Werfel, the mathematician Georg Pick, and a new arrival to the city, thirty-two-year-old Albert Einstein. Is it possible that Kafka and Einstein met and exchanged ideas? Did they influence each other from a philosophical or deep-thinking perspective? In neither Kafka's nor Einstein's correspondence there is not even the slightest mention of each other. But Einstein and Kafka, two icons of our modern era, serve as the starting point for this book on the enormous contributions in the fields of the empirical sciences, humanities, letters, and arts by individuals of Jewish origin in modernity. In this book, the reader will encounter numerous names in the pages that all spring from the fountainhead of these two antecedents, the Einsteinian and the Kafkian"--
Mandel Vilar Press 2025-09-16 622 pages

Children of the book: a memoir of reading together

Kurshan, Ilana
"A celebration of the power and wonder of lifelong reading-both secular and sacred Zibby Owens, My Most Anticipated Books 2025 In Children of the Book, Ilana Kurshan explores the closeness forged when family life unfolds against a backdrop of reading together. Kurshan, a mother of five living in Jerusalem, at first struggles to balance her passion for literature with her responsibilities as a parent. Gradually she learns how to relate to reading not as a solitary pursuit and an escape from the messiness of life, but rather as a way of teaching independence and forging connection. Introducing her children to sacred and secular literature-including the beloved classics of her childhood-helps her become both a better mother and a better reader. Chief among the books Kurshan reads with her children is the Five Books of Moses, known as the Torah, which Jews the world over read in synchrony as part of the liturgical cycle. In the five parts of this memoir, Kurshan explores the surprising resonances between the biblical text and her experiences as a mother and a reader - from the first picture books that create the world through language for little babies, to the moment our children begin reading on their own leaving us behind, atop the mountain, as they enter new lands without us. A testament to the enduring power of shared texts, Children of the Book celebrates the deep pleasures of books"-- Provided by publisher.
St. Martin's Press 2025-08-26 292 pages

The Woman and the Car

Levitt, Dorothy
This book was first published in 1909 and was written by a truly remarkable woman. It was a time in history where it was more of a "man's" world and she dared to be different. Cars were starting to come into common use (by men); women were driven around by chauffeurs or their husbands. One car manufacturing company sent her to France to learn how to drive. This was different from today because driving a car also meant working on the car! She learned how to drive alright but also taught other women to drive, including royalty!Being the woman she was, she also entered some auto races and won! This just wouldn't do, beating the male drivers, so they passed new rules banning women from entering some of the races! She kept racing in the ones that allowed her, and started racing boats!In this book you'll see where she suggests holding up a mirror to see what's behind you - it's the first mention anywhere of use of the rear view mirror. She was ahead of her time, I believe one of the first true feminists. She believed very strongly that women who wanted to should be able to drive. She wrote this book to help them learn - since she couldn't be everywhere.In her own words about this book:"A chatty little handbook for all women who motor or who want to motor"“I am writing this little book not so much for those women who have already taken up motoring, but for those who would like to, but either dare not because of nervousness, or who imagine it is too difficult to understand the many necessary details.”“Motoring is a pastime for women: young, middle-aged, and—if there are any—old. There may be pleasure in being whirled around the country by your friends and relatives, or in a car driven by your chauffeur; but the real, the intense pleasure, the actual realisation of the pastime comes only when you drive your own car.”“I will endeavour to explain everything in the simplest possible manner, without lapsing into confusing technicalities.”
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2023-04-03 213 pages

Lost and Found in Johannesburg

Mark Gevisser
An inner life of Johannesburg that turns on the author’s fascination with maps, boundaries, and transgressionsThis singular memoir begins with a transgression—the invasion of a private home in Johannesburg. But it is far more than the story of a theft. Lost and Found in Johannesburg is a luminous exploration of place, one in which the author’s and the reader’s assumptions are constantly being tested. As a child growing up in apartheid South Africa, Mark Gevisser was obsessed with maps—and with Holmden’s Register , Johannesburg’s street guide, in particular. He played a game called Dispatcher with this eccentric guide, transporting himself across the city into places that would otherwise be forbidden to him. It was through Dispatcher that he discovered apartheid by realizing that he could not find an access route to the neighboring township of Alexandra and, later, by realizing that Soweto was not mapped at all. This was the beginning of his lifelong obsession with maps and photographs, and what they tell us about borders and boundaries—how we define ourselves by staying within them or by transgressing them. This memoir is an account of getting lost in one’s hometown, and then finding oneself as a gay Jewish South African who was raised under apartheid and who eventually married a man of a different race as the country moved toward freedom. Using maps, shards of memory, photographs, and stories, Gevisser constructs a stunning portrait of race and sexuality, heritage and otherness.
Jonathan Ball 2014 354 pages

A Tibetan revolutionary: the political life and times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye

Goldstein, Melvyn C.
This is the as-told-to political autobiography of Phüntso Wangye (Phünwang), one of the most important Tibetan revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. Phünwang began his activism in school, where he founded a secret Tibetan Communist Party. He was expelled in 1940, and for the next nine years he worked to organize a guerrilla uprising against the Chinese who controlled his homeland. In 1949, he merged his Tibetan Communist Party with Mao's Chinese Communist Party. He played an important role in the party's administrative organization in Lhasa and was the translator for the young Dalai Lama during his famous 1954-55 meetings with Mao Zedong. In the 1950s, Phünwang was the highest-ranking Tibetan official within the Communist Party in Tibet. Though he was fluent in Chinese, comfortable with Chinese culture, and devoted to socialism and the Communist Party, Phünwang's deep commitment to the welfare of Tibetans made him suspect to powerful Han colleagues. In 1958 he was secretly detained; three years later, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Beijing's equivalent of the Bastille for the next eighteen years. Informed by vivid firsthand accounts of the relations between the Dalai Lama, the Nationalist Chinese government, and the People's Republic of China, this absorbing chronicle illuminates one of the world's most tragic and dangerous ethnic conflicts at the same time that it relates the fascinating details of a stormy life spent in the quest for a new Tibet.
University of California Press 2004-06-24 371 pages

The 10: a memoir of family and the open road

Hanks, E. A.
"In her trusted loaded-up minivan 'Minnie,' E.A. Hanks follows the same route as a long-ago road trip with her mother in an attempt to better understand the complicated woman who gave her life. Along the way, as she follows her mother's diaries and her own recollections of the route, she begins to uncover secrets--some unexpectedly wonderful, and others darker and more violent than she ever imagined--that bring more questions than answers. From the quiet expanses of White Sands National Park to the bustling streets of New Orleans, and the Texas-Mexico border to the swamps of the Florida panhandle, she interacts with the amazing breadth and diversity of the people that call these places home. Reckoning with the past, the present, her memories, and herself, Hanks brings us along a ... voyage towards understanding how the stories we tell about the places we're from ultimately become the stories we tell about the people we are"--
Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster 2025-04-08 352 pages

In the garden of memory

Olczak-Ronikier, Joanna
"Winner of the Nike Prize, Poland's most prestigious literary award Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland's most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of one of the country's most illustrious clans, noted for its achievements in business, politics, and culture-as they lived, struggled, and (mostly) survived through the turbulent twentieth century. Rich with tales of bravery as well as poignant, sometimes comic anecdotes of everyday life, the book follows the family members as they scattered around the world to European spas, tsarist prisons, Soviet war camps, and the Royal Air Force. Tracing their roots to a renowned Austrian rabbi, the family members included an array of amazing characters. One became an industrial magnate who founded the Citroën automobile company in France; another was a Communist revolutionary who ended up being arrested, tortured, and executed by Stalin's police. One worked as an undercover agent, another as a zoologist in France. One became a notable Polish publisher, another a leading Freudian psychiatrist. Inevitably, the tragic history of the Second World War and its catastrophic impact on European Jews looms darkly over the narrative, yet remarkably enough only two members of the clan were killed in the Holocaust. Today the survivors have continued the family journey around the world, including in the United States. Beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, In the Garden of Memory is ultimately the uplifting account of a family that never gave up hope and never gave in"--
Rivertowns Books 2025-10-14 432 pages