2342 results for "Memoir"

The times of my life: and my life with The Times

Frankel, Max
Since 1949, when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Max Frankel began to write for The New York Times, readers have looked to his work as a lens through which they could witness America's role in a rapidly changing world. In this vivid and unforgettable memoir, Frankel chronicles the times of his extraordinary life as he experienced them...within the context of the news stories that defined an era. A quintessentially American story, The Times of My Life traces Frankel's riveting personal relationship with history...his harrowing escape from Nazi Germany...his life as an immigrant on the streets of New York...and his extraordinary half-century-long career at The Times. In a rich first-person account that moves from Hitler's Berlin to Cold War Moscow, from Castro's Havana to the newsroom of America's most influential newspaper, this powerful, compelling work interweaves Frankel's personal and professional lives with the era's greatest stories, from Sputnik to the Pentagon Papers to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And it reveals Frankel's fascinating off-the-record encounters with Nikita Khrushchev, Henry Kissinger, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and a host of other history-makers who shaped their times--and ours. Guiding readers through Hitler's Berlin, Khrushchev's Moscow, Castro's Havana, and the Washington of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, THE TIMES OF MY LIFE reevaluates the Cold War, and interweaves Frankel's personal and professional life with the greatest stories of the era. -->
Delta Trade Paperbacks 2000 546 pages

And Then I Danced Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality

Mark Segal
"[A] swiftly written debut memoir...[Segal] vividly describes his firsthand experience as a teenager inside the Stonewall bar during the historic riots, his participation with the Gay Liberation Front, and amusing encounters with Elton John and Patti LaBelle . . . A jovial yet passionately delivered self-portrait inspiring awareness about LGBT history from one of the movement's true pioneers." --Kirkus Reviews "With great verve and spirit, Segal has rendered a lively and dramatic memoir of the early days of the gay rights struggle; the infighting over strategies and objectives; the long, hard road of progress; and a look at the challenges still ahead." --Booklist On December 11, 1973, Mark Segal disrupted a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News when he sat on the desk directly between the camera and news anchor Walter Cronkite, yelling, "Gays protest CBS prejudice!" He was wrestled to the studio floor by the stagehands on live national television, thus ending LGBT invisibility. But this one victory left many more battles to fight, and creativity was required to find a way to challenge stereotypes surrounding the LGBT community. Mark Segal's job, as he saw it, was to show the nation who gay people are: our sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers. Because of activists like Mark Segal, whose life work is dramatically detailed in this poignant and important memoir, today there are openly LGBT people working in the White House and throughout corporate America. An entire community of gay world citizens is now finding the voice that they need to become visible.
Open Lens 2015 302 pages

From ashes to life: my memories of the Holocaust

Eichengreen, Lucille
In this disturbing but inspirational account of her experiences of the Holocaust, Lucille Eichengreen relates her journey as a young Jewish girl through Nazi Germany and Poland - including internment in the camps at Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen. It was a journey that began in 1933, when she was eight years old and witnessed the beginnings of Jewish persecution, a journey along which she suffered the horrible deaths of her father, mother and sister. Sustained by great courage and resourcefulness, Lucille Eichengreen emerged from her nightmare with the inner strength to build a new life for herself in the United States. Only in 1991 did she return to Germany and Poland to assess the Jewish situation there. Her story is a testament to the very thing the Holocaust sought to destroy: the regeneration of Jewish life. Blessed with a remarkable memory that made her one of the most effective witnesses in the postwar trial of her persecutors, Eichengreen has composed a memoir of exceptional accuracy. As important as its factual accuracy is its emotional clarity and truth. Simple and direct, Eichengreen's words compel with their moral authority.
Mercury House 1994 217 pages

Here But Not Here A Love Story

Lillian Ross
In this fascinating and beautiful memoir, the renowned New Yorker writer Lillian Ross tells a remarkable love story of the passionate life she shared for forty years with William Shawn, The New Yorker's famous editor. "All enduring love between two people, however startling or unconventional, feels unalterable, predestined, compelling, and intrinsically normal to the couple immersed in it, so I would have to say that I had an intrinsically normal life for over four decades with William Shawn. . . . I have a lasting sense of the normalcy of it all. It was a normalcy that Bill Shawn was able to create for himself and for me against all normal odds." Shawn was married, yet Ross and Shawn created a home together a dozen blocks south of the Shawns' apartment, raised a child, and lived with discretion. Their lives intertwined from the 1950s until Shawn's death, in 1992. Ross describes how they met and the intense connection between them; how Shawn worked with some of the best writers of the period; how, to escape their developing liaison, Ross moved to Hollywood, and there wrote the famous pieces that became Picture, the classic story of the making of a movie--John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage--only to return to New York and to the relationship. The love of Shawn and Ross for each other made it impossible for them ever to part. ---- This book is a gem, an exquisitely told real-life story more potent than fiction.
Random House Value Publishing 1999-08-31

My mother's wars

Faderman, Lillian
An acclaimed writer on her mother’s tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman’s mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother’s past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path. The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman’s mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a “good-time gal.” They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life. Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York’s garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover’s angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family. Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores.
Beacon Press 2015-07-14 264 pages

Conspiracy to Riot The Life and Times of One of the Chicago 7

Lee Weiner
A memoir of a life in activism by one of the original defendants in the Trial of the Chicago 7, subject of the 2020 Oscar-nominated Aaron Sorkin film of the same name. In March 1969, eight young men were indicted by the federal government for conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. First dubbed the Conspiracy 8 and later the Chicago 7, the group included firebrands like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale. But it also included a little-known community activist and social worker from the South Side of Chicago named Lee Weiner, who was just as surprised as the rest of the country when his name was included in the indictment. The ensuing trial of the Chicago 7 became a media sensation, and it changed Weiner's life forever. In this irreverent, freewheeling memoir of an indelible moment in history--which Kirkus Reviews called a welcome addition to the library of the countercultural 1960s left--Conspiracy to Riot shows how a commitment to your ideals can change your destiny forever. With startling relevance to today's polarized political climate, Conspiracy to Riot is a book for anyone who hopes for a better, more just world, and offers a blueprint for how to make it happen.
Belt Publishing 2020 208 pages

Do you dream in color? insights from a girl without sight

Rubin, Laurie
Colors, Rubin tells us, affect everyone through sound, smell, taste, and a vast array of emotions and atmospheres. She explains that although she has been blind since birth, she has experienced color all her life. In her memoir Do You Dream in Color?, Laurie Rubin looks back on her life as an international opera singer who happens to be blind. From her loneliness and isolation as a middle school student to her experiences skiing, Rubin offers her young readers a life-story rich in detail and inspiration drawn from everyday challenges. Beginning with her childhood in California, Rubin tells the story of her life and the amazing experiences that led her to a career as an internationally celebrated mezzo-soprano. Rubin describes her past as a "journey towards identity," one she hopes will resonate with young people struggling with two fundamental questions: "Who am I?" and "Where do I fit in?" Although most of us aren't blind, Rubin believes that many of us have traits that make us something other than "normal." These differences, like blindness, may seem like barriers, but for the strong and the persistent, dreams can overcome barriers, no matter how large they may seem. This is what makes her story so unique yet universal and so important for young readers.
Seven Stories Press 2012-10-23 393 pages

Laughing Matters

Larry Gelbart
Larry Gelbart is the comic genius who developed M*A*S*H for TV, one of the longest-running, most beloved series in history; he was a much-admired member of that memorable gaggle of writers who worked for Sid Caesar, which also included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon; and he's written successful movies like Tootsie and Oh, God!, smash hits for Broadway, including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and City of Angels, TV comedy-dramas like Barbarians at the Gate and Weapons of Mass Distraction, and more. His book now adds to the fun. Part memoir, part sampler, part love letter, Gelbart tells of writing radio comedy at age sixteen for Danny Thomas--and later for Bob Hope, Jack Paar, and Red Buttons; he offers behind-the-set stories about Milton Berle, George C. Scott, and George Burns, "Klinger" and "Radar" and "Father Mulcahy"; and he lets us know about the places he's lived and how he's lived and what he's learned while doing so. Not everything is played for laughs. Some of Laughing Matters is serious--Gelbart is a wit, not a gag writer, and he cares deeply about writing. Some is touching--for instance, his account of the last days of M*A*S*H. His sketches of comedy performers and writers are "elegant," said Publishers Weekly in an early review, his sense of form original. He's won Emmys, Tonys, and Peabody awards, he's twice been nominated for an Academy Award, and now, in print, he may well win your heart. A lot of funny things happened on the way to this book--and you'll be hugely entertained.
Random House Value Publishing 1999-08-31

Sometimes Brilliant

Larry Brilliant
When a powerful mystic steps on the hand of a radical young hippie doctor from Detroit, it changes lives and the world. Sometimes Brilliant chronicles the adventures of a philosopher, seeker, unconventional doctor, groundbreaking tech innovator, and key player in the eradication of one of the worst pandemics in human history. His story--about what happens when love, compassion, and determination meet the right circumstances to effect positive change--is the kind that keeps hope and the sense of possibility alive. After sitting at the feet of Martin Luther King Jr. at the University of Michigan in 1963, Larry Brilliant was swept up into the civil rights movement, marching and protesting across America and Europe. As a radical young doctor, he followed the Hippie Trail from London over the Khyber Pass with his wife Girija, Wavy Gravy, and the Hog Farm commune to India. There, he found himself in a Himalayan ashram wondering whether he had stumbled into a cult. Instead, one of India's greatest spiritual teachers, Neem Karoli Baba, opened Larry's heart and told him his destiny was to work for the World Health Organization to help eradicate deadly smallpox. He never would have believed he'd become a key player in eliminating a ten-thousand-year-old disease that killed more than half a billion people in the twentieth century alone. Brilliant's unlikely trajectory, chronicled in Sometimes Brilliant, has brought him into close proximity with political leaders, spiritual masters, cultural heroes, and titans of technology around the world--from the Grateful Dead to Mikhail Gorbachev, from Ram Dass, the Dalai Lama, Lama Govinda, and Karmapa to Steve Jobs and the founders of Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Microsoft, and eBay, and Presidents Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. Anchored by the engrossing account of the heroic efforts of the extraordinary people involved in smallpox eradication in India, this is a riveting and fascinating epidemiological expedition, an honest reckoning of an entire generation, and a deeply moving spiritual memoir. It is a testament to faith, love, service, and what it means to engage with life's most important questions in pursuit of a better, more brilliant existence.
HarperCollins Publishers 2016-10 864 pages

When My Husband Does the Dishes

Kerri Sackville
'When My Husband Does the Dishes . . . is about love in real life. It's about what marriage looks like after three children and 150 years of togetherness. It's about little white lies and boxer shorts on the floor and eating frankfurts for dinner every night. It's my life. And I suspect it could be yours too.' Kerri Sackville has written this book for people like her, people who can relate to her, or people who find her amusing - which, in a tragic sort of way, she is. When My Husband Does the Dishes . . . is part memoir, part faux guide to marriage and motherhood and a must read for all women. It is accurate, clever and very, very funny.
Ebury Australia 2011-05-02

Internal combustion: the story of a marriage and a murder in the motor city

Maynard, Joyce
On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet. Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman - a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, and she'd killed him in self-defense. At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer. Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemed to have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year's research in suburban Detroit - but the story she found there will take the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, the working class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday and even, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtown Detroit. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensic pathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor, an old-school police chief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softball scorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murdered man, and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from the death of their beloved coach, and a mother who has to tell her daughter why her favorite teacher won't be in school any more. As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To Die For , based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream.
Jossey-Bass 2008-02-04 496 pages

An Amazing Adventure Joe and Hadassah's Personal Notes on the 2000 Campaign

Joseph I. Lieberman,Hadassah Lieberman
A groundbreaking memoir featuring the personal recollections of former Senator Joe Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, of their 2000 vice presidential campaign. From the second they find out that Joe had been chosen by Al Gore as his running mate, the Liebermans' lives drastically changed—privacy vanished as political handlers took over. Now, Joe and Hadassah recount the excruciating vetting process, the exhilaration of the Democratic National Convention, the tension of the debates, and finally, the drama of Election Day and of the contentious weeks that followed. Thrilled to be running in a national campaign that they regarded as immensely important to the national purpose, and profoundly moved by the audiences that came to see and hear them, the Liebermans nevertheless admit that it was a complicated and demanding experience. The Liebermans' voices alternate throughout the book as they describe the excitement, their sense of the honor of being chosen, the extraordinary and sometimes exhausting demands, and the satisfactions and joys of the hard-fought campaign they waged as a team. Woven throughout this inspirational but cautionary tale are the Liebermans' opinions, including their take on Joe's being the first Jewish vice presidential candidate and on Hadassah's debut to a national public as a first-generation American and child of Holocaust survivors. An Amazing Adventure is an honest, high-spirited, revealing, and ultimately optimistic book from the candidate and his wife on the American way of running for national office.
Simon & Schuster 2007-08-24 288 pages

Now and Then From Coney Island to Here

Joseph Heller
From the author of two of our most legendary novels, Catch-22 and Something Happened , comes a slyly funny, vastly revelatory memoir that is at once a loving evocation of a lost America and an exploration of the frontier where life turns into literature. Now and Then follows Joseph Heller from his fatherless childhood on the boardwalks of Depression-era Coney Island, where he grew up amid the rumble of the Cyclone and the tantalizing aroma of Mrs. Shatzkin's knishes. It offers a dizzying bombardier's-eye view of the sky over wartime Italy, where Heller encountered the characters and incidents he would later translate into Catch-22. It depicts a writer coming to terms with both rejection and celebrity. Here, in short, is a life filled with incident and insight, recollected with subversive humor, exquisite timing, and a fine appreciation for the absurd.
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 1999-01-26 272 pages

Inside the Stalin archives: discovering the new Russia

Brent, Jonathan
From the first publisher granted access to Stalin's personal archive, a provocative and insightful portrait of modern Russia—the most compelling since David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb. To most Americans, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. In Inside the Stalin Archives, Jonathan Brent asks, why didn't this happen? Why are the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion sold openly in the lobby of the State Duma? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in Moscow's airport? Brent draws on fifteen years of unprecedented access to high-level Soviet Archives to answer these questions. He shows us a Russia where, in 1992, used toothbrushes were sold on the sidewalks, while now shops are filled with luxury goods and the streets are jammed with Mercedes. Stalin's specter hovers throughout, and in the book's crescendo Brent takes us deep into the dictator's personal papers to glimpse the dark heart of the new Russia. Both cultural history and personal memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives is a deeply felt and vivid portrait of Russia in the twenty-first century.
Atlas 2008 335 pages

Strings Attached

Joanne Lipman,Melanie Kupchynsky
Strings Attached is a powerful memoir about resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy, an inspiring and poignant tale of how one man transformed his own heartache into a legacy of joy for his students. His students knew Jerry Kupchynsky as "Mr. K"-the fierce Ukrainian-born music teacher who rehearsed them until their fingers almost bled and who made them better than they ever expected to be. Away from the classroom, though, life seemed to conspire against him at every turn. Strings Attached takes you on his remarkable journey, from his childhood on the run in Nazi Germany, to his life in America caring for his disabled wife while raising their two small daughters, to his search for his beloved younger daughter after she mysteriously disappeared-a search that would last for seven years. His unforgettable story is lyrically told in alternating chapters by two childhood friends who reconnected decades later: Melanie Kupchynsky, his daughter, and Joanne Lipman, a former student. Heartbreaking yet ultimately triumphant, Strings Attached is a testament to the astonishing power of hope-and a celebration of the profound impact one person can have on the lives of others.
Hachette Books 2014-09-16 368 pages

The actual one: how I tried, and failed, to avoid adulthood forever

Suttie, Isy
A hilarious, razor-sharp debut memoir about the moment when you realize that your friends have all grown up and left you behind, for readers of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and Kelly Williams Brown’s Adulting. Isy Suttie wakes up one day in her late twenties to discover that the deal she’d struck with her friends, to put off growing up for as long as possible, had been entirely in her head. Everyone around her is suddenly into mortgages, farmers’ markets, and going off the Pill, rather than running naked into the sea or getting hammered in a country pub with eighty-year-old men. After a particularly crushing breakup precipitated by Isy’s gifting of a human-size papier-mâché penguin to her boyfriend, her dearest friend advises Isy not to worry: the next guy she meets will be The Actual One. Heartened by this promise, Isy decides to keep delaying the onset of adulthood, whether that means standing on the side of a highway in nothing but an old fur coat and sneakers, dating a man who speaks only in rhyme, or conquering her fears of Alpine skiing by wildly overestimating her athletic ability. Insightful and laugh-out-loud funny, The Actual One is an ode to the confusing wilderness of your late twenties, alongside a quest for a genuinely good relationship . . . or at the very least, a good story to tell.
HarperPerennial 2016 272 pages

Heimlich's maneuvers: my seventy years of lifesaving innovation

Heimlich, Henry J.
" Here, in his own words, is the story of one of the twentieth century's most creative medical innovators, Dr. Henry Heimlich. The thoracic surgeon is best known for having developed the Heimlich Maneuver, the world's easiest-to-learn and most universally known method to save people from choking to death on food or foreign objects. But many don't know about Dr. Heimlich's other life-saving inventions. He is the inventor of the Heimlich Chest Drain Valve, which saved thousands of lives during the Vietnam War, and the Heimlich MicroTrach, which provides a remarkably efficient way for people to take oxygen. In the present decade, Dr. Heimlich has turned his attention to two devastating illnesses for which medicine has not yet found a cure--cancer and HIV. He describes his research and its promise, as well as the controversy and resistance his new ideas have generated from the medical establishment. Interweaving the author's personal life with riveting stories of his numerous medical breakthroughs, this rich memoir provides insights into the workings of a creative mind and the machinations of the American medical system."
Prometheus Books 2014 253 pages