books tagged “memoir”

One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.

Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.

On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.

Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry "both feeds and feeds off the young," insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. "Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior," he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost of having it "your way" really worth it? --Lesley Reed [via]

A feminist landmark, this big, ambitious novel tells the story of writer Anna Wulf and the crises she faces in her personal, political and professional life. Confounded by writer's block, the ferociously independent Wulf explores her situation in four notebooks, one for each of the strands in her life; the golden one is the one in which, struggling to retain her sanity, she brings these strands together. [via]

Frankly, this literary critic didn't expect Mick Foley's memoir of his life as Mankind (and his other wrestling personas, Cactus Jack and Dude Love) to hit No. 1 on Amazon's hardcover non- fiction bestseller list in its first literary bout. The cover is cluttered and confusing and do we really need 500-plus pages of Foley's boasts? Yes. Foley gives his all for his calling and he burns to tell his adventures. Take the famous tale of how he lost most of his ear (the bloody result is depicted in the 16-page, colour photo section). It was in his 1994 bouts with Vader (Leon White), after getting a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, and 21 stitches in the first match, Foley did his "hangman" routine, wherein he catches his neck between the second and third ropes and spins them into a twist: "The end result is the illusion of a man being hanged by his neck while his body kicks and writhes in an attempt to get out ... the man actually is hanging by his neck and the body really does kick and writhe in an attempt to get out." Unfortunately, in the prior match, Too Cold Scorpio had had the officials tighten the ropes so Foley tore off his ear to avoid death by strangulation, like "a fox that chews off its paw to escape a trap." Foley also wrestles on 10,000-thumbtack mats with barb-wire ropes and C-4 explosives and earns the ultimate compliment: "The fans really like the way you bleed." Many fans also like the way his gory story reads. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com [via]

The legendary major league star discusses his family life and friendships, the difficulties of being an African-American, his teammates--including Clemente, Campanella, Mays, Musial, and Robinson--and his shattering of Babe Ruth's home run record. Reprint. NYT. K. [via]

One night, after an unsatisfying evening at a party, author Oriah Mountain Dreamer wrote the start of The Invitation. By the light of her streetlight, she began, "It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.... I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain...."

Her profound invitation (longer than is written here) became the framework for this wise and inspiring book. Chapter by chapter, the author uses passages from her "Invitation" to welcome readers into a life that is more soul fulfilling and passionate, and has far greater truth and integrity. In a sense, she invites readers to get a life instead of buying into a lifestyle. Each chapter ends with a guided meditation specific to the theme of the chapter, such as "The Joy" and "The Failure."

Despite her suspiciously New Age-sounding name, Oriah Mountain Dreamer is a highly grounded, practical, and honest writer. This fresh and beautifully packaged book is destined for great acclaim in the realm of spiritual inspiration. --Gail Hudson [via]

Now in paperback for the first time, The New York Times bestseller Jaguar Woman tells "tales of extraordinary mind-and-spirit adventures".--San Francisco Chronicle. [via]

Melody Beattie gives you the tools to discover the magnificence and splendor of your being.  Deepak Chopra, author of Jesus and Buddha

 Beattie understands being overboard, which helps her throw bestselling lifelines to those still adrift.  Time magazine

From the New York Times bestselling author of Codependent No More, The Language of Letting Go, Finding Your Way Home, Choices, and Stop Being Mean to Yourself, comes Journey to the Heart: a collection of daily meditations that helps readers unlock personal creativity and discover their divine purposes in life.

One of the original Mercury 7 astronauts tells his life story and offers deeply-held views on the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. [via]

It's 1894, and Rose and her parents are settling into life at Rocky Ridge Farm. Soon the school year will start and Rose will be the new girl. Will she like her classmates and teacher in Missouri as much as she liked everything in her old town?

In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads "From the Death Bed of Jimmy Many Horses III," even though he actually writes then on his kitchen table. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and mostly poetically between modern Indians and the traditions of the past. [via]

Celebrate thirty years of the worlds most notorious rockband with the deluxe collectors edition of The Dirtthe outrageous, legendary,no-holds-barred autobiography of Mötley Crüe. Fans have gotten glimpses into the bands crazy worldof backstage scandals, celebrity love affairs, rollercoaster drug addictions,and immortal music in Mötley Crüebooks like Tommyland and TheHeroin Diaries, but now the full spectrum of sin and success by Tommy Lee,Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, and Mick Mars is an open bookin The Dirt. Even fans alreadyfamiliar with earlier editions of the bestselling exposé will treasure this gorgeous deluxe edition.  Joe Levy at Rolling Stone calls The Dirtwithout a doubt . . . the most detailedaccount of the awesome pleasures and perils of rock & roll stardom I haveever read. It is completely compelling and utterly revolting. [via]

"I'm a fabulist by trade," warns Gabriel Noone, a late-night radio storyteller, as he begins to untangle the skeins of his tumultuous life: his crumbling ten-year love affair, his disaffection from his Southern father, his longtime weakness for ignoring reality. Gabriel's most sympathetic listener is Pete Lomax, a thirteen-year-old fan in Wisconsin whose own horrific past has left him wise and generous beyond his years. But when this virtual father-son relationship is rocked by doubt, a desperate search for the truth ensues. Welcome to the complex, vertiginous world of The Night Listener . [via]

Douglas Coupland takes his sparkling literary talent in a new direction with this crackling collection of takes on life and death in North America -- from his sweeping portrait of Grateful Dead culture to the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe and the middle class.

For years, Coupland's razor-sharp insights into what it means to be human in an age of technology have garnered the highest praise from fans and critics alike. At last, Coupland has assembled a wide variety of stories and personal "postcards" about pivotal people and places that have defined our modern lives. Polaroids from the Dead  is a skillful combination of stories, fact and fiction -- keen outtakes on life in the late 20th century, exploring the recent past and a society obsessed with celebrity, crime and death. Princess Diana, Nicole Brown Simpson and Madonna are but some of the people scrutinized.

Book [via]

In the years since his death in 1965, Randall Jarrell has inspired a wealth of tributes. Robert Lowell and John Berryman commemorated their friend and fellow poet in verse, while a lovely 1967 festschrift included contributions by the likes of Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, Marianne Moore, Maurice Sendak, and Elizabeth Bishop (who recalled that Jarrell "always seemed more alive than other people, as if constantly tuned up to the concert pitch that most people, including poets, can maintain only for short and fortunate stretches.")

Still, none of these homages have quite the intensity or immediacy of Mary Jarrell's Remembering Randall. The author was married, after all, to her subject. And as she relates, their relationship involved a very high level of playful symbiosis:

To be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him. He wanted, and we had, a round-the-clock inseparability. We took three meals a day together, every day. I went to his classes and he went on my errands. I watched him play tennis; he picked out my clothes. Sometimes we were brother and sister "like Wordsworth and Dorothy" and other times we were twins, Randall pretended.

Amazon Exclusive Content

A Michael Crichton Timeline
Amazon.com reveals a few facts about the "father of the techno-thriller."

1942: John Michael Crichton is born in Chicago, Illinois, on Oct. 23.

1960: Crichton graduates from Roslyn High School on Long Island, New York, with high marks and a reputation as a star basketball player. He decides to attend Harvard University to study English. During his studies, he rankles under his writing professors criticism. As an act of rebellion, Crichton submits an essay by George Orwell as his own. The professor doesnt catch the plagiarism and gives Orwell a B-. This experience convinces Crichton to change his field of study to anthropology.

1964: Crichton graduates summa cum laude from Harvard University in anthropology. After studying further as a visiting lecturer at Cambridge University and receiving the Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellowship, which allowed him to travel in Europe and North Africa, Crichton begins coursework at the Harvard School of Medicine. To help fund his medical endeavors, he writes spy thrillers under several pen names. One of these works, A Case of Need, wins the 1968 Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award.

1969: Crichton graduates from Harvard Medical school and is accepted as a post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Science in La Jolla, Calif. However, his career in medicine is waylaid by the publication of the first novel under his own name, The Andromeda Strain. The novel, about an apocalyptic plague, climbs high on bestseller lists and is later made into a popular film. Crichton said of his decision to pursue writing full time: To quit medicine to become a writer struck most people like quitting the Supreme Court to become a bail bondsman.

1972: Crichton's second novel under his own name The Terminal Man, is published. Also, two of Crichton's previous works under his pen names, Dealing and A Case of Need are made into movies. After watching the filming, Crichton decides to try his hand at directing. He will eventually direct seven films including the 1973 science-fiction hit Westworld, which was the first film ever to use computer-generated effects.

1980: Crichton draws on his anthropology background and fascination with new technology to create Congo, a best-selling novel about a search for industrial diamonds and a new race of gorillas. The novel, patterned after the adventure writings of H. Ryder Haggard, updates the genre with the inclusion of high-tech gadgets that, although may seem quaint 20 years later, serve to set Crichton's work apart and he begins to cement his reputation as the father of the techno-thriller.

1990: After the 1980s, which saw the publication of the underwater adventure Sphere (1987) and an invitation to become a visiting writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1988), Crichton begins the new decade with a bang via the publication of his most popular novel, Jurassic Park. The book is a powerful example of Crichton's use of science and technology as the bedrock for his work. Heady discussion of genetic engineering, chaos theory, and paleontology run throughout the tightly-wound thriller that strands a crew of scientists on an island populated by cloned dinosaurs run amok. The novel inspires the 1993 Steven Spielberg film, and together book and film will re-ignite the worlds fascination with dinosaurs.

1995: Crichton resurrects an idea from his medical school days to create the Emmy-Award Winning television series ER. In this year, ER won eight Emmys and Crichton received an award from the Producers Guild of America in the category of outstanding multi-episodic series. Set in an insanely busy an often dangerous Chicago emergency room, the fast-paced drama is defined by Crichton's now trademark use of technical expertise and insider jargon. The year also saw the publication of The Lost World returning readers to the dinosaur-infested island.

2000: In recognition for Crichton's contribution in popularizing paleontology, a dinosaur discovered in southern China is named after him. "Crichton's ankylosaur" is a small, armored plant-eating dinosaur that dates to the early Jurassic Period, about 180 million years ago. "For a person like me, this is much better than an Academy Award," Crichton said of the honor.

2005: Crichtons newest thriller State of Fear is published.

Amazon.com's Significant Seven

Michael Crichton kindly agreed to take the life quiz we like to give to all our authors: the Amazon.com Significant Seven.

Q: What book has had the most significant impact on your life?

A: Prisoners of Childhood by Alice Miller

Q: You are stranded on a desert island with only one book, one CD, and one DVD--what are they?

A: Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (Witter Bynner version)

Symphony #2 in D Major by Johannes Brahms (Georg Solti)

Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa

Q: What is the worst lie you've ever told?

A: Surely you're joking.

Q: Describe the perfect writing environment.

A: Small room. Shades down. No daylight. No disturbances. Macintosh with a big screen. Plenty of coffee. Quiet.

Q: If you could write your own epitaph, what would it say?

A: I don't want an epitaph. If forced, I would say "Why Are You Here? Go Live Your Life."

Q: Who is the one person living or dead that you would like to have dinner with?

A: Benjamin Franklin

Q: If you could have one superpower what would it be?

A: Invisibility

[via]

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.... When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out."

Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.

Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the heart of her tale; we first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school. She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. At first the circumstances surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's consciousness. Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused, Tom Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in events beyond their understanding. During the trial, the town exhibits its ugly side, but Lee offers plenty of counterbalance as well--in the struggle of an elderly woman to overcome her morphine habit before she dies; in the heroism of Atticus Finch, standing up for what he knows is right; and finally in Scout's hard-won understanding that most people are essentially kind "when you really see them." By turns funny, wise, and heartbreaking, To Kill a Mockingbird is one classic that continues to speak to new generations, and deserves to be reread often. --Alix Wilber [via]

This mesmerizing, surreal account of the bizarre adventures of Terence McKenna, his brother Dennis, and a small band of their friends, is a wild ride of exotic experience and scientific inquiry. Exploring the Amazon Basin in search of mythical shamanic hallucinogens, they encounter a host of unusual characters -- including a mushroom, a flying saucer, pirate Mantids from outer space, an appearance by James and Nora Joyce in the guise of poultry, and translinguistic matter -- and discover the missing link in the development of human consciousness and language.

Like the lucid madness chronicled in "Girl, Interrupted," this riveting memoir traces the devastating path of clinical depression through the diaries of Martha Manning--a psychotherapist who became a patient and underwent electroshock therapy. [via]

If you can read this review (and voice your opinion about his book on Amazon.com), you have Tim Berners-Lee to thank. When you've read his no-nonsense account of how he invented the World Wide Web, you'll want to thank him again, for the sheer coolness of his ideas. One day in 1980, Berners-Lee, an Oxford-trained computer consultant, got a random thought: "Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked?" So he created a system to give every "page" on a computer a standard address (now called a URL, or Universal Resource Locator), accessible via the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), formatted with the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and visible with the first browser, which did the trick of linking us all up.

He may be the most self-effacing genius of the computer age, and his egalitarian mind is evident in the names he rejected for his invention: "I thought of Mine of Information, or MOI, but moi in French means 'me,' and that was too egocentric.... The Information Mine (TIM) was even more egocentric!" Also, a mine is a passive repository; the Web is something that grows inexorably from everyone's contributions. Berners-Lee fully credits the colorful characters who helped him get the bobsled of progress going--one colleague times his haircuts to match the solstices--but he's stubbornly independent-minded. His quest is to make the Web "a place where the whim of a human being and the reasoning of a machine coexist in an ideal, powerful mixture."

Hard-core tech types may wish Berners-Lee had gone into deeper detail about the road ahead: the "boon and threat" of XML, free vs. commercial software, VRML 3-D imaging, and such. But he wants everyone in on the debate, so he wrote a brisk book that virtually anyone can understand. --Tim Appelo [via]

The author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee describes his life from his first job as a delivery boy and his adolescent career in mail-order fraud, to his stint in journalism and his participation in World War II. Reprint. [via]

The sequel to Comeback chronicles the struggles that the Draveckys have faced since Dave's forced retirement from baseball, including Jan's depression and the amputation of Dave's arm. Reprint. [via]