Catalog Search Results
2) John McPhee
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Summary
In this first full-length study of McPhee, Michael Pearson argues that the writer successfully employs the techniques of fiction writing in his journalistic art while honoring his obligation to fact. In exceptionally lucid and entertaining prose, Pearson approaches his subject thematically, examining McPhee's lifework in the realms of personal profiles, sense of place, science and technology, and nature. In a comprehensive biographical chapter, Pearson...
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"How did a kid whose dad lived in the poorhouse become one of the most successful storytellers in the world? - James nearly died early on the morning he was born. - His grandmother told him something that's been his motto for his entire writing career - 'Hungry dogs run faster'. - When James worked at a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, he met the singer James Taylor. And the poet Robert Lowell. - James's first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number,...
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Barbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven. In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain to explore the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Barbara Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse...
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Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us but also of the ties to our mothers and fathers, to those who love us, and our inextricable connection to those who shaped our values in our search for intimacy, independence, love, and family. A powerfully...
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"From New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling memoir about unlocking and embracing her creativity-and how it saved her life"--
Attenberg reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life and a voice she could claim for herself. Drawn to a life on the road, her wanderlust led her across the country and eventually around the globe. She began to reflect on the experiences of her youth, and began writing: researching...
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Thirty years ago Tobias Wolff wrote a memoir that changed the form. This Boys Life is the story of the young, tough-on-the-outside but vulnerable Toby Wolff. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother travel from Florida to Utah to a small village in Washington state, with many stops along the way. As each place doesnt quite work out, they pick up to find somewhere new. In the story of their journey, Wolff masterfully recreates...
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Two unforgettable characters, Jack Ernest Stokes, known as Blinking Jack, and his wife, Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes, tell the story of their years together. Jack was forty and Ruby only twenty when they were married. For twenty-five years they lived together, man and wife, until Ruby died of lung cancer. A LITERARY GUILD AND DOUBLEDAY BOOK CLUB selection. Kaye Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina and attended Rocky Mount Senior High School,...
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"From the acclaimed author of A Case of Curiosities, Allen Kurzweil's stranger-than-fiction "investigative memoir", detailing his 40-year-search for his boarding school bully who tied him up at the age of twelve and whipped him to the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar, and who went on to lead a mad-cap life of international crime and financial fraud"--
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"The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays"--
""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious...
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"In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller's life and the questions which run through it. How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author's way of writing,...
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In the final memoir of her Crosswicks Journals, the author of A Wrinkle in Time paints an intimate portrait of her forty-year marriage.
A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship.
As Newbery Medal winner Madeleine L’Engle describes a relationship characterized by compassion, respect, and growth, as well as challenge and conflict, she beautifully...
A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship.
As Newbery Medal winner Madeleine L’Engle describes a relationship characterized by compassion, respect, and growth, as well as challenge and conflict, she beautifully...
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"Bird Cloud" is the name the author gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four hundred foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. She also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy,...
16) Roughing it
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Originally published over one hundred years ago, "Roughing It" tells the (almost) true story of Mark Twain's rollicking adventures across the United States. A hilarious account of how the author tried finding wealth in the rocks of Nevada, it was published before his most famous works and shows why he would grow to become one of the most beloved American writers of all time. The story follows many of Twain's early adventures, including a visit to...
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Presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.
"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography." Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his "Final (and Right) Plan"...
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In this New York Times bestseller, follow the author of The Notebook as he travels the world with his brother learning about faith, loss, connection, and hope.
As moving as his bestselling works of fiction, Nicholas Sparks's unique memoir, written with his brother, chronicles the life-affirming journey of two brothers bound by memories, both humorous and tragic. In January 2003, Nicholas Sparks and his brother, Micah,...
As moving as his bestselling works of fiction, Nicholas Sparks's unique memoir, written with his brother, chronicles the life-affirming journey of two brothers bound by memories, both humorous and tragic. In January 2003, Nicholas Sparks and his brother, Micah,...
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Will James' cowboy autobiography Lone Cowboy tells how a little boy, hardly more than a baby, becomes an orphan in the West; how an old French trapper, whom the boy calls Bopy, adopts him and takes him on his long, long hunts; how when he is hardly more than a little boy Bopy is lost in an icy river and the child, heartbroken, rides down into the prairie region alone-on his own. James gives a complete and varied idea of how a cowboy lives.
This...
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"Over the last forty years, Stuart Woods has written more than ninety novels of suspense and intrigue, beginning with the award-winning Chiefs. Featuring iconic crime-fighting and jet-setting leads, the plots are masterfully conceived and wonderfully escapist. What many readers don’t know is that Woods's very own life was filled with similar stories of adventure. Born in Georgia, Woods worked in advertising in New York, served in the US Air...