9 results for "Memoir"

The doctor is in: Dr. Ruth on love, life, and joie de vivre

Westheimer, Ruth K.,Lehu, Pierre A.
Everyone knows Dr. Ruth as the most famous and trusted sex therapist, but few people know she narrowly escaped death from the Holocaust, was raised in an orphanage in Switzerland, or that she was a sniper during Israel's War of Independence. After years spent as a student in Paris, Dr. Ruth came to America dreaming of a new life though never expecting the dramatic turns that would take place. And at the age of eighty-seven, she is as spirited as ever. Through intimate and funny stories, Dr. Ruth sheds light on how she's learned to live a life filled with joie de vivre. And she shows readers how they too can learn to deal with tragedy and loss, challenges and success, all while nourishing an intellectual and emotional spark, and, above all, having fun! Hilarious, inspiring, and profound, The Doctor Is In will change the way you think about life and love, in all their limitless possibilities.
Amazon Publishing 2015-06-02 191 pages

Behind every choice is a story

Feldt, Gloria
Behind Every Choice Is a Story is a poignant blend of personal stories, commentary, and memoir that chronicles the life-changing reproductive choices that women, men, and teens make every day. The book also traces Gloria Feldt’s personal journey from the dusty oil fields of West Texas to becoming a Head Start teacher and activist in the civil rights and women’s movement, culminating in her current standing as one of the most influential voices in the reproductive freedom movement. The book was inspired by the 1928 Motherhood in Bondage , a collection of letters written by women to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Publishing these letters from women in desperate circumstances helped to equate the concept of birth control with higher values of wanted children, healthy mothers, loving couples, self realization, and female emancipation. Behind Every Choice Is a Story addresses many of those same issues and values and advances a new agenda for the twenty-first century. It sounds a clarion call by highlighting the importance of storytelling as a cultural force in encouraging change. Feldt recognizes and values women’s stories for their personal, social, and political importance. The book uniquely positions current issues of reproductive freedom in the context of everyday experiences and provides a refreshing new framework to understand the current political and social landscape. Although the primary audience for this book is women who support reproductive freedom, a wide audience including men and teens will find their experiences among the compelling stories. It will also appeal to those who are intrigued by the unique perspective the book gives to the real-life impact of reproductive choices.
University of North Texas Press 2002 242 pages

Hitler, Stalin and I: an oral history

Kovály, Heda,Třeštíková, Helena
The oral history of a renowned Czech writer, whose optimism and faith in people survived grueling experiences under authoritarian regimes. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street --based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression--was named an NPR Best Book in 2015. In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovály and award-winning filmmaker Helena Trestíková. In it, Kovály recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slánsky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovály, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996. Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist. Helena Trestíková has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan.
DoppelHouse Press 2018 160 pages

Gimme some truth: the John Lennon FBI files

Wiener, Jon
When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld—along with almost 200 other pages—on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth , 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available—complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format. Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and—in some cases—the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges. Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.
University of California Press 1999 344 pages

Women writing culture

Ruth Behar,Deborah A. Gordon
"A rich collection that I will use in teaching graduates and undergraduates about the weave of ethnography, narrative, the women's movement, and feminism. Crafted by an impressive range of scholars, the essays are empirically rich and theoretically cogent. But most important, they engage the complexities of multicultural, feminist, and multinational ethnographies and the stories that matter to politics, scholarship, and lives. With an ear for the tones of race and gender, this book answers the political, generic, and theoretical challenge of Writing Culture with layered essays that rewrite an important range of cultural conversations."—Donna Haraway, author of Professor , History of Consciousness Board, UCSC "Since the advent of the 'post-modern' in ethnography, we have been much in need of a marvelous volume such as this, placing 'woman' at the center of the debate. Women Writing Culture will prove as stimulating for our time as its great predecessor, Women, Culture and Society was for the 1970s."—Jose E. Limon, University of Texas "A groundbreaking book—provocative, illuminating, imaginative—and it is a pleasure to read. A trenchant yet always generous feminist critique of the masculinist bias in the theoretical canon of anthropological texts, it expansively and imaginatively maps the future directions of a feminist anthropology. In moving and courageous acts of reconstruction, the writers in this volume boldly cross disciplinary and generic lines, reading fiction as anthropology, writing theater as ethnography, getting personal, radically reconceiving the relationship of self and other and, thereby, the field itself. Feminist scholars of all disciplines will find here enabling textual and conceptual strategies as well as memorable voices and powerful stories."—Marianne Hirsch, Dartmouth College, author of The Mother-Daughter Plot
University of California Press 1995 457 pages

Oliver Tambo's dream: four lectures

Sachs, Albie
"If a paternity test were done on South Africa's widely admired Constitution, whose DNA would come up? Is the Constitution just a beautiful piece of paper? If Oliver Tambo were alive today, walking around South Africa, would he be pleased with what he saw? In this riveting, direct account of the genesis of South Africa's Constitution, former Justice Albie Sachs answers these crucial questions. In Oliver Tambo's Dream, Sachs writes about the years he spent working under Tambo's leadership in exile preparing for a post-apartheid constitutional order in South Africa and about the extreme crises that were overcome during the post-1990 constitution-making process to arrive at the document we have today. Tackling the burning issues that face our country today, he argues that the Constitution is a framework for struggle and decolonization that can be used to bring about land reform and true equality"--
African lives 2017 142 pages