| The pure angel of our fantasies | | Posted Saturday, October 28, 2006 12:28:36 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | There's a GAP commercial that features a young, dark-haired woman dressed all in black except for white socks. She has high cheekbones, huge eyes and a bouncing ponytail. Her image rotates, like da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, but more hip. You can't help it; if you've ever seen an Audrey Hepburn movie, you peer as close as you can to see if it could possibly be her. You're aware of the perfection of the "look" -- the wide grin, the exquisite profile, the girlish thinness -- the definition of gamine. Chic and glee. Reserve without haughtiness. Fawn with pearls. Her image is so laced into our collective unconscious that, years later, we seek to replicate it in order to announce the return of the thin black pant. Hepburn thought of herself as a model, a dancer, but it takes more than empty posing to create a continuing image of radiant simplicity.... | |
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| | | The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History | | Posted Monday, September 11, 2006 1:41:38 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society. The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds. These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.... | |
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| | | Elizabeth | | Posted Thursday, September 07, 2006 11:41:35 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | For more than six decades she has been part of our lives. An American icon, Elizabeth Taylor has been surrounded by fame and notoriety since childhood. Now acclaimed biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli looks past the tabloid version of Elizabeth's life to the person she really is -- and how she evolved from a child star to a woman in her own right. At the heart of this impeccably researched work is the first fully realized portrait of Elizabeth Taylor's family: her canny, controlling mother, who, from the moment she laid eyes on her baby, began plotting her success; and her father, often portrayed as distant, but whose connection with his daughter was far more complex than people knew. As Taraborrelli brings to life the people around Elizabeth and her rise in 1940s Hollywood, he reveals the qualities that made her a star, the associations that put her at the right place at the right time, and the ways in which she was singularly unprepared for life out on her own. While Elizabeth's eight marriages to seven men have been widely publicized, this author examines the psychological and emotional roots of each relationship, including her abusive marriage to Nicky Hilton, her attraction to swashbuckling Mike Todd, and the complex, incendiary Taylor-Burton love affair that continued for decades and never truly died. Finally, Taraborrelli chronicles Elizabeth's most bravura performance of all. Despite the highly public battles with substance abuse and chronic illness, she achieved new success and sustenance in family, friendships, and philanthropy. With never-before-published family photos by Taylor historian Tom Gates, as well as rare family photos, Elizabeth is the story of a woman you thought you knew -- and can now finally begin to understand.... | |
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| | | Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn | | Posted Saturday, September 02, 2006 3:41:49 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | From Martha Gellhorn's critically acclaimed biographer, the first collected letters of this defining figure of the twentieth-centuryMartha Gellhorn's heroic career as a reporter brought her to the front lines of virtually every significant international conflict between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Cold War. While Gellhorn's wartime dispatches rank among the best of the century, her personal letters are their equal: as vivid and fascinating as anything she ever published. Gellhorn's correspondence from 1930 to 1996—chronicling friendships with figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and H. G. Wells, as well as her tempestuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway—paint a vivid picture of the twentieth century as she lived it. Caroline Moorehead, who was granted exclusive access to the letters, has expertly edited this fascinating volume, providing prefatory and interstitial material that contextualizes Gellhorn's correspondence within the arc of her entire life. The letters introduce us to the woman behind the correspondent—a writer of wit, charm, and vulnerability. The result is an exhilarating, intimate portrait of one of the most accomplished women of modern times. ... | |
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| | | Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl | | Posted Tuesday, August 29, 2006 1:41:35 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | A beloved classic since its initial publication in 1947, this vivid, insightful journal is a fitting memorial to the gifted Jewish teenager who died at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Born in 1929, Anne Frank received a blank diary on her 13th birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Her marvelously detailed, engagingly personal entries chronicle 25 trying months of claustrophobic, quarrelsome intimacy with her parents, sister, a second family, and a middle-aged dentist who has little tolerance for Anne's vivacity. The diary's universal appeal stems from its riveting blend of the grubby particulars of life during wartime (scant, bad food; shabby, outgrown clothes that can't be replaced; constant fear of discovery) and candid discussion of emotions familiar to every adolescent (everyone criticizes me, no one sees my real nature, when will I be loved?). Yet Frank was no ordinary teen: the later entries reveal a sense of compassion and a spiritual depth remarkable in a girl barely 15. Her death epitomizes the madness of the Holocaust, but for the millions who meet Anne through her diary, it is also a very individual loss. --Wendy Smith... | |
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| | | Wins, Losses, and Lessons: An Autobiography | | Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 11:41:37 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | When I die and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be. For reasons known only to God, I was asked to write an autobiography. Most people who knew me growing up didn't think I would ever read a book, let alone write one. -Lou Holtz Few people in the history of college sports have been more influential or had a bigger impact than Lou Holtz. Winner of the three national Coach of the Year honors, the only coach ever to lead six different schools to season-ending bowl games, and the ninth-winningest coach in college football history, Holtz is still teaching and coaching, although he is no longer on the gridiron. In his most telling work to date, the man still known as "Coach" by all who cross his path reveals what motivated a rail-thin 135-pound kid with marginal academic credentials and a pronounced speech impediment to play and coach college football, and to become one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in history. With unflinching honesty and his trademark dry wit, Holtz goes deep, giving us the intimate details of the people who shaped his life and the decisions he would make that shaped the lives of so many others. His is a storied career, and Holtz provides a frank and inside look at the challenges he overcame to turn around the programs at William and Mary, North Carolina State, Arkansas, and Minnesota. From growing up in East Liverpool, Ohio, to his early days as a graduate assistant at the University of Iowa, to his national championship runs at Notre Dame and his final seasons on the sidelines in South Carolina, Lou Holtz gives his best, a poignant, funny, and instructive look into a life well lived. ... | |
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| | | Insight: Case Files from the Psychic World | | Posted Tuesday, August 22, 2006 9:41:39 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | In her most personal book to date, New York Times bestselling author Sylvia Browne shares intimate stories about her career giving psychic readings. Insight is Sylvia Browne's exploration of the experiences she has had during psychic readings over the course of her career. Opening up completely, Sylvia shares her thoughts on the significance of her gift and its impact on others as she tells her stories about life as a psychic. Covering a wide variety of subjects, including Love/Romance/Relationships, Health/Illness, Family/Children, Finances, Spiritual Issues (past lives), Legal Issues/Cases (inheritance, property), Pets, and Lost Items, Insight is Sylvia's generous reflections about being a psychic and her compassion for her subjects-in other words, everything about her that her hundreds of thousands of fans adore.... | |
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| | | THE BUSINESS OF MEMORY / Families want to preserve their life stories | | Posted Monday, August 21, 2006 7:14:34 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | As Baby Boomers grew, they sparked trends ranging from blue jeans to aerobics studios to minivans. This year, the first wave of America's 78 million Baby Boomers is turning 60. And as Boomers age, businesses are gearing up to meet their needs. One such industry consists of companies helping to preserve family memories. These stories highlight companies that produce personal histories, and ones that transfer old home movies and videos to DVDs. David Rekart had been planning a photographic slide show for his father's 70th birthday. But he decided to go a step further and have a video documentary made about his father's life. Rekart hired Oakland videographer Teri Duff, who shot three hours of interviews with his parents, then edited them down to a 45-minute biographical video.... | |
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| | | The Tender Bar: A Memoir | | Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 5:41:37 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | "Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me," asserts J.R. Moehringer, and his compelling memoir The Tender Bar is the story of how and why. A Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for the Los Angeles Times, Moehringer grew up fatherless in pub-heavy Manhasset, New York, in a ramshackle house crammed with cousins and ruled by an eccentric, unkind grandfather. Desperate for a paternal figure, he turns first to his father, a DJ whom he can only access via the radio (Moehringer calls him The Voice and pictures him as "talking smoke"). When The Voice suddenly disappears from the airwaves, Moehringer turns to his hairless Uncle Charlie, and subsequently, Uncle Charlie's place of employment--a bar called Dickens that soon takes center stage. While Moehringer may occasionally resort to an overwrought metaphor (the footsteps of his family sound like "storm troopers on stilts"), his writing moves at a quick clip and his tale of a dysfunctional but tightly knit community is warmly told. "While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us," Moehringer says, and his story makes us believe it. --Brangien Davis... | |
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| | | Season of Life: A Football Star, a Boy, a Journey to Manhood | | Posted Monday, August 14, 2006 11:41:38 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Joe Ehrmann, a former NFL football star and volunteer coach for the Gilman high school football team, teaches his players the keys to successful defense: penetrate, pursue, punish, love. Love? A former captain of the Baltimore Colts and now an ordained minister, Ehrmann is serious about the game of football but even more serious about the purpose of life. Season of Life is his inspirational story as told by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeffrey Marx, who was a ballboy for the Colts when he first met Ehrmann. Ehrmann now devotes his life to teaching young men a whole new meaning of masculinity. He teaches the boys at Gilman the precepts of his Building Men for Others program: Being a man means emphasizing relationships and having a cause bigger than yourself. It means accepting responsibility and leading courageously. It means that empathy, integrity, and living a life of service to others are more important than points on a scoreboard. Decades after he first met Ehrmann, Jeffrey Marx renewed their friendship and watched his childhood hero putting his principles into action. While chronicling a season with the Gilman Greyhounds, Marx witnessed the most extraordinary sports program he'd ever seen, where players say "I love you" to each other and coaches profess their love for their players. Off the field Marx sat with Ehrmann and absorbed life lessons that led him to reexamine his own unresolved relationship with his father. Season of Life is a book about what it means to be a man of substance and impact. It is a moving story that will resonate with athletes, coaches, parents -- anyone struggling to make the right choices in life.... | |
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