2221 results for "Autobiography"

Culture in practice: selected essays

Sahlins, Marshall David
Essays that span the career of a prominent anthropologist and address the fundamental questions of the field. Culture in Practice collects the academic and political writings from the 1960s through the 1990s of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. More than a compilation, Culture in Practice unfolds as an intellectual autobiography. The book opens with Sahlins's early general studies of culture, economy, and human nature. It then moves to his reportage and reflections on the war in Vietnam and the antiwar movement, the event that most strongly affected his thinking about cultural specificity. Finally, it offers his more historical and globally aware works on indigenous peoples, especially those of the Pacific islands. Sahlins exposes the cultural specificity of the West, developing a critical account of the distinctive ways that we act in and understand the world. The book includes a play/review of Robert Ardrey's sociobiology, essays on "native" consumption patterns of food and clothes in America and the West, explorations of how two thousand years of Western cosmology affect our understanding of others, and ethnohistorical accounts of how cultural orders of Europeans and Pacific islanders structured the historical experiences of both. Throughout, Sahlins offers his own way of thinking about the anthropological project. To transcend critically our native categories in order to understand how other peoples have historically constructed their modes of existence--even now, in the era of globalization--is the great challenge of contemporary anthropology.
Zone Books 2000 646 pages

Modernism in the streets: a life and times in essays

Berman, Marshall,Marcus, David,Sclan, Shellie
"Essays tracing the intellectual life of a quintessential New York City writer and thinker Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his brilliant, nearly sui generis book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a masterpiece of the literature on modernism. But like many New York intellectuals, the essay was his characteristic form, accommodating his multifarious interests and expressing his protean, searching exuberant mind. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical '60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification. Concluding with his last essay, completed just before his death in 2013, this book is Berman's intellectual autobiography, tracing his career as a thinker through the way he read the "signs in the street.""--
Verso 2017 393 pages

Mosaic: memoirs

Kirstein, Lincoln
Mosaic: Memoirs, Lincoln Kirstein's long-awaited autobiography, is a compelling, often highly subjective evocation of his astonishing youth. The book's scenes move from the old mansions of Brahmin Boston to the waterfront bars of Brooklyn, George Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, and the brothels of Marrakesh. It culminates with thrilling suspense in 1933, when Kirstein visits Paris, hoping to lure George Balanchine to the United States. Kirstein shapes his numinous memories into the story of a young man's quest to fuse his various roles into a unified self. Mosaic is the epic history of his ultimately triumphant search for a vocation. As a chapter in the growth of modernism, and as a contribution to cultural history - and the history of assimilation - this superbly written, humorous, and candid book is unique and invaluable.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1994-05-01 269 pages

Harvey Pekar: conversations

Pekar, Harvey
Harvey Pekar's American Splendor is the longest-running and arguably the most influential autobiographical comic book series produced in America. Since 1976, Pekar (b. 1939) has reported on his life through his comics. Pekar's comic books deal with his life as a Veterans Administration clerk and freelance music critic; his friends and co-workers and their stories; and his home city of Cleveland. Pekar's struggles with physical and mental problems, a low-paying job, Hollywood, marriage, his daughter's adoption, and success are all laid out in his comics. Pekar prides himself on depicting his life in all its ""splendor."" Harvey Pekar: Conversations offers almost twenty-five years of interviews from a variety of sources including small fanzines, local public radio shows, and the Washington Post. The volume reveals his thoughts and feelings about comics, autobiography, his appearances on David Letterman's show in the 1980s, his life with cancer, and how a successful 2003 movie adaptation of American Splendor has changed and not changed his life. His comics work has won the National Book Award, spawned theatrical productions, and served as the basis for the award-winning movie starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar. Michael G. Rhode is an independent comics scholar and an editor of the International Journal of Comic Art. His work has been published in the Comics Journal and Hogan's Alley.
University Press of Mississippi 2008 226 pages

A life of magic chemistry: autobiographical reflections including post-Nobel Prize years and the methanol economy

Olah, George A.
The autobiography of a Nobel Prize winner, this book tells us about George Olah's fascinating research into extremely strong superacids and how it yielded the common term "magic acids." Olah guides us through his long and remarkable journey, from Budapest to Cleveland to Los Angeles, with a stopover in Stockholm. This updated autobiography of a Nobel Prize winner George A. Olah: Chronicles the distinguished career of a chemist whose work in a broad range of chemistry areas, and most notably that in methane chemistry, led to technologies that impact the processing and utility of alternative fuels Is based on Olah's work on extremely strong superacids and how they yielded the common term, "magic acids" Details events since the publication of the first edition in 2000 Inspires readers with details on Dr. Olah's successful recent research on methanol, intended to help provide a solution to "the oil problem"
John Wiley & Sons, Inc 2015-05-26 320 pages

Operation Last Chance: one man's quest to bring Nazi criminals to justice

Zuroff, Efraim
An autobiography by Zuroff (born in 1948 in New York), focusing on his relentless search for Holocaust perpetrators, both Nazis and their local collaborators, mainly in Eastern Europe, who after World War II found refuge in the USA and other Western countries. In 1978 Zuroff began to work at the newly established Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and from 1979 he worked with the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, created to take legal action against Nazi war criminals and collaborators living in the USA. In the late 1980s he launched a campaign on behalf of the Wiesenthal Center to prosecute Nazi criminals and collaborators who had entered Australia, Canada, Britain, and other Western countries posing as refugees. In the course of his activities, Zuroff was confronted with the reluctance of authorities in Western countries to punish citizens who had been Holocaust perpetrators; many of those who Zuroff was able to trace died unpunished. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, he launched a similar campaign in formerly communist countries; his attempts to convince Latvian and Estonian governments to de-heroize mass murderers such as Herberts Cukurs and Evald Mikson, and to bring to trial numerous others, were in vain. In 1998-99, however, he was successful in achieving the extradition to Croatia from Argentina and then the trial and punishment of Dinko Šakić. Buoyed by the success, Zuroff began Operation Last Chance, aiming to trace and bring to trial former mass murderers from the Baltics, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, Romania, etc. Relates some achievements of this operation. Zuroff's activities have occasionally evoked antisemitic and neo-Nazi backlash in the Baltics, Croatia, and elsewhere.
Palgrave Macmillan 2009-11-10 238 pages

Lenten lands

Gresham, Douglas H.
Including the True Story of the Remarkable Love Affair between Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis There has probably never been a less likely couple: she, an American divorcee and the mother of two young boys; he, an Oxford don and confirmed bachelor who inhabited an eccentric household with his brother, a retired Royal Army major. Yet the relationship of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, portrayed in this moving autobiography by her son Douglas Gresham, was destined to become of the most deeply moving love stories of our time.
HarperSanFrancisco 1994-06-03 225 pages

Ecstasy and terror: from the Greeks to Game of thrones

Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam
"In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways. Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture's Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a "Greek DNA" in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the "aesthetics of victimhood" in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgard. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence--a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist's personal essays, including his "critic's manifesto" and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics."--
New York Review Books 2019 378 pages

Confessions of a good girl

McLean, Andrea
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 'Loose Women's' Andrea McLean is much loved for her bubbly, warm personality. But her life has seen its share of heartache, as well as love and happiness, and now she's finally ready to tell the full story. She takes us from a childhood spent constantly on the move, leaving her feeling like an outsider, to landing a dream job as a weathergirl on GMTV. She describes the tough lessons she had to learn to survive in TV and her hilarious - and sometimes disastrous - encounters with celebrities as a showbiz reporter. She reveals how she pushed herself to be the perfect daughter, the perfect wife and mother - so when she had an affair that ended her first marriage, the guilt and self-loathing drove her shockingly close to a breakdown.
Sidgwick & Jackson 2012 308 pages

The nakedness of the fathers: biblical visions and revisions

Ostriker, Alicia
Like much twentieth-century feminist writing today, this book crosses the boundaries of genre. Biblical interpretation combines with fantasy, autobiography, and poetry. Politics joins with eroticism. Irreverence coexists with a yearning for the sacred. Scholarship contends with heresy. Most excitingly, the author continues and extends the tradition of arguing with God that commences in the Bible itself and continues now, as it has for centuries, to animate Jewish writing. The difference here is that the voice that debates with God is a woman's.
Rutgers University Press 1994 260 pages

Between The Lies

Marv Levy
When does the End Zone Justify the Means? The Los Angeles Leopards and the Portland Pioneers are on a collision course toward the Super Bowl Championship. One team is led by a take-no-prisoners head coach; the other by a cerebral, slow-and-steady coach who has been thrust into the spotlight because of a tragedy. A tense showdown is about to unfold before the world's football fans. But along the way to the championship game, something bad happens: the very integrity of the game comes within a yard of ruin! In his thrilling new work of fiction-Between the Lies- Hall of Fame Coach and New York Times best-selling author Marv Levy takes us on a journey through the NFL like we've never seen before. Through the eyes of a memorable cast of characters, many of whom are based on real football players, coaches, general managers, and owners, we get to see professional football from the inside. And we get to see the game's underbelly, where rules are bent or broken, lies are used as promises, and the integrity of the game hangs in the balance. Between the Lies is filled with the kind of intimate knowledge that only a Hall of Fame coach could possess. It is a must-read for fans of the NFL and for all of us who ever wondered what goes on the inside the sanctity of the locker room. This book, of Sports Fiction, follows Coach Levy's New York Times Best-Selling autobiography-Where Else Would You Rather Be? Marv's infectious personality shines through every page. You will laugh out loud, curse out loud, and cheer out loud!
Ascend Books 2011-09 288 pages

Autobiography of A Recovering Skinhead

Frank Meeink
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead is Frank Meeink, s raw telling of his descent into America, s Nazi underground and his ultimate triumph over drugs and hatred. Frank, s violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate, while addiction made him easy prey for a small group of skinhead gang recruiters. By 16 he had become one of the most notorious skinhead gang leaders on the East Coast and by 18 he was doing hard time. Teamed up with African-American players in a prison football league, Frank learned to question his hatred, and after being paroled he defected from the white supremacy movement and began speaking on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League. A story of fighting the demons of hatred and addiction, Frank's downfall and ultimate redemption has the power to open hearts and change lives.
ReadHowYouWant.com, Limited 2011-02-02 456 pages

Little me: my autobiography

Lucas, Matt
This is the story of little me, from pudgy, awkward child to pudgy, slightly less awkward adult - via school musicals, adolescent angst, stand-up, Shooting Stars , Little Britain , Doctor Who , love, loss, wigs and giant pink babygros. And, in case your attention span is as short as mine, it comes in a handy A to Z format. So B is for Baldy! (yes, people did shout this at me in the playground), G is for Gay (because I'm an actual real life gay) and I is for Idiot (I was born a berk. I probably even stubbed my toe on the way out). It will warm your heart, make you snort out loud in public and there's even a catchy song in the middle. What I'm saying is, please buy this book. It is VERY good. I know I'm biased because I wrote it but it is.
Canongate 2018-06-07 336 pages

In Another Place With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer

Susan Mailer
"In Another Place brings us to many remarkable new places in the Mailer universe. Written with tenderness, acuity and unadorned psychological depth, Susan Mailer's memoir is a powerful look at the literary world." -Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin"Brisk, enthralling [. . .] full of dramatic family scenes, most of them heretofore unknown. I wish I had her memoir in hand when writing my biography." -J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life Norman Mailer, Susan Mailer's father, was among the most celebrated, talented, and controversial writers of the 20th Century. The Naked and the Dead (1948), inspired by his experience in World War II, was a bestseller and made him famous at the age of 25. Notoriously combative and egotistical, her father enjoyed a good ¿ght both physically and verbally. Whether cheered or booed, Mailer was front and center in America's cultural battles for more than 50 years. He married six times and was father to nine children. Susan, born in 1949, is the eldest.Susan's parents separated when she was a baby. She grew up shuttling between her mother's home in Mexico and New York. Later she would marry a Chilean activist, spending the majority of her adult life in Chile, where she is a practicing psychoanalyst.In Another Place tells the story of her intense and complex relationship with her father, her ¿ve stepmothers and nine siblings, and the joys and pains of being part of the large Mailer clan. It is a tale of separation, and of the rewards and struggles of living in two very di¿erent cultures. Of being someone who belongs everywhere and nowhere, always longing for a life . . . In Another Place.
Northampton House Press 2019-11-05 316 pages

Maimonides A Biography

Solomon Zeitlin
Maimonides: A Biography is a comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most important figures in Jewish history, Moses Maimonides. Written by Solomon Zeitlin, a renowned scholar of Jewish studies, this book offers a detailed exploration of Maimonides' life, from his birth in Muslim Spain in 1135 to his death in Egypt in 1204.The book begins with an overview of the historical and cultural context in which Maimonides lived, including the rise of Islam, the Reconquista, and the flourishing of Jewish scholarship in Spain. It then delves into Maimonides' early life and education, his family background, and his intellectual development.Zeitlin examines Maimonides' major works, including his commentary on the Mishnah, the Guide for the Perplexed, and the Mishneh Torah, and explores the impact of these works on Jewish thought and practice. He also looks at Maimonides' role as a physician and his contributions to the field of medicine.Throughout the book, Zeitlin provides insights into Maimonides' personality, beliefs, and relationships with other scholars and leaders of his time. He also highlights the challenges that Maimonides faced as a Jew living in a Muslim-dominated society, including persecution and forced conversion.Maimonides: A Biography is a fascinating and engaging read for anyone interested in Jewish history, philosophy, and culture. It offers a nuanced and insightful portrait of one of the most influential figures in Jewish intellectual history.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.
Literary Licensing, LLC 2011-08 258 pages