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A witty and addictively readable day-by-day literary companion. At once a love letter to literature and a charming guide to the books most worth reading, A Reader's Book of Days features bite-size accounts of events in the lives of great authors for every day of the year. Here is Marcel Proust starting In Search of Lost Time and Virginia Woolf scribbling in the margin of her own writing, "Is it nonsense, or is it brilliance?" Fictional events that take place within beloved books are also included: the birth of Harry Potter’s enemy Draco Malfoy, the blood-soaked prom in Stephen King’s Carrie. A Reader's Book of Days is filled with memorable and surprising tales from the lives and works of...
"From the bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge comes the dramatic conclusion of how conservatism took control of American political power"--
Did you know that people in Indonesia have a word that means 'to take off your clothes in order to dance'? Or how many words the Albanians have for eyebrows and moustaches? Or that the Dutch word for skimming stones is plimpplamppletteren? Drawing on the collective wisdom of over 154 languages, this intriguing book is arranged by theme so you can compare attitudes all over the world to such subjects as food, the human body and the battle of the sexes. Here you can find not only those words for which there is no direct counterpart in English (such as the Japanese age-otori which means looking less attractive after a haircut), but also a frank discussion of exactly how many 'Eskimo' terms there are for snow, and a vast array of information exploring the wonderful and often downright strange world of words. Oh, and tingo means 'to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by asking to borrow them'.
The story of the American self-made man carries a perennial interest in American literature and cultural studies. This book expands the study of such stories to include the writings of Frederick Douglass, Horatio Alger, and James Weldon Johnson, and the work of silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. Thomas Nissley examines a number of texts, from Reconstruction-era autobiographies to the films of the 30s, to show the sustained market value of status and personal authenticity in the era of contract and free labor.
Denoon has a ball lampooning the wannabe local art scene and the emerging city's sudden hunger for global applause, circa 1967.
Cutting through the headlines and spin, this is the first book to give us a true picture of the reality on the ground, through the words of the people there - from commanders to intelligence officers, army doctors to ordinary soldiers. Providing eye-witness accounts that contradict the official stories and figures, they give a chilling picture of the deceit, stupidity, wishful thinking, lack of forward planning and total intellectual failure of those behind the invasion. The result is an extraordinary new insight into the plight of ordinary soldiers doing nightmarish jobs, and the real nature of the fighting in Iraq.
Book connoisseur Tom Nissley has combed literary history to capture the stories that make writers' lives perennially fascinating: their epiphanies, embarrassments and achievements. Each handsome page in A Reader's Book of Days is devoted to a day of the year, featuring original accounts of events in the lives of great writers, and fictional events that took place within beloved books.
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Witty and heartfelt, clear-sighted and irreverent, Poser is the book that sane, sensible and intelligent mothers around the world have been waiting for
Why does the other lane always seem to be moving faster? Why are people so different inside their cars than they are outside them? Is traffic a microcosm of society, or does the road make its own rules? Traffic speaks volumes: bringing together people from every walk of life. In this hugely enjoyable, curiosity-filled book, Tom Vanderbilt explains why traffic problems are really people problems. Traffic shows that how we behave walking the streets, on our bikes and in our cars is an astonishing cultural indicator; a living, constantly surprising model, what physicists call 'emergent collective behaviour'. Vanderbilt chauffeurs us through why it's so hard to pay attention in traffic, why women cause more congestion than men, what factors make us more likely to honk our horns amongst a host of eye-opening highway conundrums. This book will change the way you view the world and help you better navigate it.