Posts Tagged ‘biography’

North of Normal

Caught up in the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, Cea Person’s grandfather traded the suburban comforts of California for a pot-smoking, free-loving, clothing-optional life under a canvas tipi in the Canadian wilderness. As a child, Cea knew little about the world beyond her eccentric, hand-to-mouth existence, but her teenage mother, Michelle, found something lacking:…

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Wild Tales

A founding member of the iconic bands Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the Hollies shares the story of his life from his youth in post-war England through his creative relationship with Joni Mitchell and his enduring career as a solo musician and political activist.

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This Wheels on Fire

“Helm lays it all bare in vivid, impassioned prose, adding an earthly, backwoods tone that makes the book read like a Southern novel, like Thomas Wolfe writing about rock ’n’ roll.” —Boston Globe “One of the most insightful and intelligent rock bios in recent memory.” —Entertainment Weekly The Band, who backed Bob Dylan when he…

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Just Kids

An artist and musician recounts her romance, lifetime friendship, and shared love of art with Robert Mapplethorpe, in a memoir that includes such influential artists as Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and William Burroughs.

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My Secret Sister

The powerful story of two sisters separated at birth, one abused and one loved, and their search to understand their past. Helen grew up in a pit village in Tyneside in the post-war years, with her gran, aunties and uncles living nearby. She felt safe with them, but they could not protect her from her…

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12 Years a Slave

Now a major motion picture directed by Steve McQueen and starring Brad Pitt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Paul Giamatti 12 Years a Slave is a riveting true account of a free man captured and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War South. Solomon Northup’s narrative explores one of the darkest times in…

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An Appetite for Wonder

The evolutionary biologist and atheist, whose work has transformed thought on genes, evolution, and religion, offers insight into his own evolution as a man and as a thinker, from his beginnings in Kenya to his intellectual awakening at Oxford.

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Assisted Loving

What would you do if your eighty-year-old father dragged you into his hell-bent hunt for new love? A few months after the death of his wife, Joe Morris, an affable, eccentric octogenarian, needs a replacement. If he can get a new hip, he figures, why not a new wife? At first, his skeptical son Bob…

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Barbarian Days

Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific,…

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The Book of Wanderings

To a mother and daughter on an illuminating pilgrimage, this is what the desert said: Carry only what you need. Burn what can’t be saved. Leave the remnants as an offering. When Kimberly Meyer gave birth to her first daughter, Ellie, during her senior year of college, the bohemian life of exploration she had once…

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