Dagbøker og memoarer

Truly Silly is a book of true stories and anecdotes, as told in the author, Nick Ryan's, inimitable style.

An astonishing, intimate and powerful memoir by the author of Richard and Judy Book Club pick SugarThis is necessary work. This is love work. This is legacy literature about me and mine born into a world run by them and theirs.On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died. She was in a car crash on the motorway turnoff to Detroit. For a few minutes, she was clinically dead. From the moment of her resuscitation, we follow a remarkable life, all the way up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar.In 80s Brooklyn, growing up in terror of her alcoholic father, young Bernice loses herself in books, finding solace in summer trips to her aunt's home in Barbados and escaping to boarding school. But it's not until she reads Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, stories about 'messy, beautiful, joyful Black people' so reminiscent of her loved ones, that she sees herself within their pages.Bernice's family story begins in Sandersville, Georgia, with freedwoman Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1870. Her descendants survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, joined the 'great migration', cried when Dr King was assassinated during The Civil Rights Movement. Wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down through generations of women like Lou's handmade quilt.Tracing her roots gives Bernice the strength to write her own story, liberating herself from generational trauma while honouring her ancestors. A memoir of many threads, First Born Girls is an extraordinarily moving account of a life shaped both by family history and a drive to be something more.

A scientist's journey from observation to discovery is anything but straightforward. It is littered with failure, unexpected diversions and joyous realizations. Science helps us to understand ourselves - but what we know about the world around us, what has already been explored and discovered, is only half of science's story.Dr Camilla Pang will look at some of the biggest mysteries facing science today and how some of the best, most cutting-edge scientists can illuminate our own approaches to observation, hypothesis, exploration, troubleshooting and discovery in our own lives.

Explores the life of one of Scotland's most important poet-thinkers as told by himself.

First scholarly edition of Conan Doyle's semi-autobiographical, epistolary novel originally published at the height of his initial fame, 1894-9.

Around the world, women's rights are under attack.

Mike Murtagh's memoir traces his journey from 1950s South Wales to encounters with danger, espionage, and unique insights into the Russian psyche and military.Spying on the Kremlin details the background and unintentional turning points in what has been an eventful life. Mike Murtagh has had a gun stuck in his face, been seconds from a mid-air collision, been struck by lightning in an aircraft, made two emergency landings, had a sniper-sight trained on him, been the target of at least one honeytrap, nearly bled to death in India, been threatened by people working for the Azeri Mafia, worked on a movie with three Oscar-winners and may have inadvertently eaten someone.It's a memoir of a working-class boy in an unlikely life journey from austere 1950s South Wales to the political theater of The Kremlin and beyond via service as an RAF Officer and as a Diplomat. His experiences of living and working in Russia has given him valuable insights into the Russian psyche, as well as the workings and capabilities of the Russian military which still have currency and relevance.Given his humble origins, none of this was ever supposed to have happened to him and could not have been predicted. Such opportunities were almost unavailable to working-class boys at the time. However, sometimes in an almost accidental fashion, he grasped the opportunities that came his way.

A window into the troubled world of the depression sufferer, interspersed with helpful biblical wisdom and reflection

By spring 1938, Prague is a city increasingly on tenterhooks in expectation of an attack by Nazi Germany. Earlier that year the pressure of the situation produced a schism in the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia between Vítězslav Nezval, who wanted to continue to support the Soviet Union, and those who condemned Stalin's show trials, purges, and executions. Nezval chronicles this tumultuous period by embedding it in a paean to Prague, wondering if the city, and everything about the city he loves, will survive the horrors that are about to be visited upon her. With Apollinaire serving as his guide, he introduces us to the cafés and pubs he would frequent, many of which no longer exist, the various neighborhoods he lived in as a destitute student, the parks where he sought solace, and the people he would meet on the street, musing on some of the figures central to his poetics, such as André Breton and Lautréamont. While at times lamenting the changing face of Prague and that Hitler might reduce it to rubble, Nezval takes us into the places that spontaneously spur him to reflect on the issues facing artists of the day and the precarious sociopolitical situation. This translation is of the rare unexpurgated first edition and includes Nezval's photographs and illustrations as well as an appendix that maps out the significant revisions made later, providing additional translations of the longer passages that were inserted as replacement for what was expunged from the original edition.

As a young girl Brooke Randel knew little about the Holocaust—just that it was a catastrophe in which millions were murdered, and that her grandma Golda Indig barely escaped that fate. But her Bubbie never spoke about what happened, and the two spent most of their time together making pleasant memories: baking crescent roll cookies, playing gin rummy, and watching Baywatch. Until an unexpected phone call when Golda said, out of the blue: “You should write about my life. What happened in the war.”What results is a fascinating memoir—about one woman's harrowing survival, and another's struggle to excavate the story from under the sands of time, and her grandma's illiteracy. Chronicling the darkness of the past and the difficult (and occasionally comic) challenges of bringing it to life in a sunny Florida condo, this book offers an insightful look into the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren,and the impossible pull of both silence and remembrance.

Action-packed memoir featuring real life experiences from the most dangerous places on earth, including a literal minefield. First Into Action Again is a sequel to Duncan Falconer's best-selling first autobiography, First Into Action.

Laurence Catlow writes here on many subjects close to his fisher's heart: the contrast between fishing in early spring and in autumn, the realisation that mayfly fishing is not as easy as it seems, views on flies, on fishing in an opposing wind, low or high water, holiday fishing, why a brace of trout matters so much, and why small wild trout can mean so much to an angler. He sums up: 'Anyway, throughout this book I have been trying to come to some sort of understanding about why this whole business of catching trout means so much to me and why, after fifty years spent catching trout in fair numbers, I find an even deeper satisfaction in catching them now than I did as a young fisher when they were caught much less frequently and were therefore individually much more important. I hope that I have managed some insights but it seems to me that there is always more to be seen and more to be said.'

The very first book published by The O'Brien Press in 1974 celebrates fifty years in print. Full of historical facts, anecdotes and Dublin wit, this book evokes the spirit, the characters and colours, the sights, sounds and even the smells of old Dublin.

In this compelling, conversational memoir, Jerome A. Cohen recounts a dramatic life of striving for a better world from Washington, DC, to Beijing, offering vital first-hand insights from the study and practice of Sino-American relations.