| Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion | | Posted Saturday, September 09, 2006 9:42:30 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | What happens in the Mansion, doesn't stay in the Mansion! How did I get here? I was raised a nice Catholic girl in Ontario, Canada. I am an only child whose parents lavished their attention and resources on me. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree and a law degree, and I'm studying to take the California bar. I am comfortable with my own sexuality, responsible for my own orgasm, and have never been sexually or emotionally abused. And yet for two years, I lived at the infamous Playboy Mansion, rolled in a posse of seven succulent beauties, and was a co-girlfriend of the father of the sexual revolution and the world's largest living hedonist. What is wrong with this picture? The Bunnies. The Girlfriends. The Mansion. The Grotto. The Myth. The Man. The Fantasy. The Reality. Izabella St. James left colder climes for the beaches of Malibu. Young, blond, and pretty, she was looking for fun, and the SoCal nightlife was a powerful magnet. Out clubbing one night, she met Hugh Hefner and his friends. Beyond the silk robe and age-proof good looks, Hugh was a genial man who invited Izabella to join his group of friends and then to move into the world-famous Mansion as one of Hef's girlfriends. (Plural.) Bunny Tales is Izabella's story-of a party girl who discovered what work it is to play all the time. Plastic surgery, gorgeous clothes, cool cars, and a generous weekly allowance are the perks of Mansion life, but Hef's girlfriends are a clique, a sorority, a group of best buds, and bitter rivals, the worst of high school in an adult party circuit. Izabella was witness to the growing pains of an empire-and legend-built on a revolution long over. Like the best relationships, Bunny Tales is honest and fun, revealing and real, satisfying and surprising.... | |
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| | | Break Point!: An Insider's Look at the Pro Tennis Circuit | | Posted Monday, September 04, 2006 3:41:58 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Spanning 13 professional seasons, this colorful and personal account of one man's life on the grueling pro tennis circuit pulls no punches. As one of only two players over the age of 30 ranked in the top 20 players in the world, Vince Spadea offers an inside perspective on his life as a world-class athlete: 11-month seasons, 68 tournaments, five continents, four court surfaces, and countless hits and misses. Starting at age eight under the tutelage of his demanding father, he climbed the rankings, battling injury, coaching decisions, and snubs from both fans and players. His place in the glamorous and gritty world-class tennis scene gives him much dirt to dish, and all the big names are there—Andy Roddick, Roger Federer, Martina Navratilova, and Jennifer Capriati. Spadea takes shots with John McEnroe at practice, raps with the Williams sisters over email, and trades barbs with Andre Agassi, who once called Spadea a "journeyman." Part memoir and part exposé, this equally comic and gripping trip through professional tennis reveals that the game may begin on the court, but it continues far outside the white lines.... | |
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| | | Teacher Man: A Memoir | | Posted Thursday, August 31, 2006 11:41:36 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | For 30 years Frank McCourt taught high school English in New York City and for much of that time he considered himself a fraud. During these years he danced a delicate jig between engaging the students, satisfying often bewildered administrators and parents, and actually enjoying his job. He tried to present a consistent image of composure and self-confidence, yet he regularly felt insecure, inadequate, and unfocused. After much trial and error, he eventually discovered what was in front of him (or rather, behind him) all along--his own experience. "My life saved my life," he writes. "My students didn't know there was a man up there escaping a cocoon of Irish history and Catholicism, leaving bits of that cocoon everywhere." At the beginning of his career it had never occurred to him that his own dismal upbringing in the slums of Limerick could be turned into a valuable lesson plan. Indeed, his formal training emphasized the opposite. Principals and department heads lectured him to never share anything personal. He was instructed to arouse fear and awe, to be stern, to be impossible to please--but he couldn't do it. McCourt was too likable, too interested in the students' lives, and too willing to reveal himself for their benefit as well as his own. He was a kindred spirit with more questions than answers: "Look at me: wandering late bloomer, floundering old fart, discovering in my forties what my students knew in their teens." As he did so adroitly in his previous memoirs, Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, McCourt manages to uncover humor in nearly everything. He writes about hilarious misfires, as when he suggested (during his teacher's exam) that the students write a suicide note, as well as unorthodox assignments that turned into epiphanies for both teacher and students. A dazzling writer with a unique and compelling voice, McCourt describes the dignity and difficulties of a largely thankless profession with incisive, self-deprecating wit and uncommon perception. It may have taken him three decades to figure out how to be an effective teacher, but he ultimately saved his most valuable lesson for himself: how to be his own man. --Shawn Carkonen... | |
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| | | Warriors Don't Cry: Searing Memoir of Battle to Integrate Little Rock | | Posted Sunday, August 27, 2006 9:41:37 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | You've gotta learn to defend yourself. Never let your enemy know what you are feeling. -- The soldier assigned to protect MelbaPlease, God, let me learn how to stop being a warrior. Sometimes I just need to be a girl. -- Melba's diary, on her sixteenth birthdayIn 1957 Melba Pattillo turned sixteen. That was also the year she became a warrior on the front lines of a civil rights firestorm. Following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board Education, she was one of nine teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock's Central High School. This is her remarkable story.You will listen to the cruel taunts of her schoolmates and their parents. You will run with her from the threat of a lynch mob's rope. You will share her terror as she dodges lighted sticks of dynamite, and her pain as she washes away the acid sprayed into her eyes. But most of all you will share Melba's dignity and courage as she refuses to back down. ... | |
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| | | The Lost Boy: A Foster Child's Search for the Love of a Family | | Posted Thursday, August 24, 2006 7:41:40 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Imagine a young boy who has never had a loving home. His only possesions are the old, torn clothes he carries in a paper bag. The only world he knows is one of isolation and fear. Although others had rescued this boy from his abusive alcoholic mother, his real hurt is just begining -- he has no place to call home. This is Dave Pelzer's long-awaited sequel to A Child Called "It". In The Lost Boy, he answers questions and reveals new adventures through the compelling story of his life as an adolescent. Now considered an F-Child (Foster Child), Dave is moved in and out of five different homes. He suffers shame and experiences resentment from those who feel that all foster kids are trouble and unworthy of being loved just because they are not part of a "real" family. Tears, laughter, devastation and hope create the journey of this little lost boy who searches desperately for just one thing -- the love of a family.... | |
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| | | The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq | | Posted Sunday, August 13, 2006 7:41:33 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat who had recently completed an epic walk from Turkey to Bangladesh, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war. The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart's year. As a participant he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, it amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.... | |
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| | | The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej | | Posted Sunday, August 06, 2006 3:41:44 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej, the only king ever born in the United States, came to the throne of his country in 1946 and is now the world's longest-serving monarch. The King Never Smiles, the first independent biography of Thailand's monarch, tells the unexpected story of Bhumibol's life and sixty-year rule—how a Western-raised boy came to be seen by his people as a living Buddha, and how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical could in fact be so deeply political and autocratic.Paul Handley provides an extensively researched, factual account of the king's youth and personal development, ascent to the throne, skillful political maneuverings, and attempt to shape Thailand as a Buddhist kingdom. Handley takes full note of Bhumibol's achievements in art, in sports and jazz, and he credits the king's lifelong dedication to rural development and the livelihoods of his poorest subjects. But, looking beyond the widely accepted image of the king as egalitarian and virtuous, Handley portrays an anti-democratic monarch who, together with allies in big business and the corrupt Thai military, has protected a centuries-old, barely modified feudal dynasty.When at nineteen Bhumibol assumed the throne, the Thai monarchy had been stripped of power and prestige. Over the ensuing decades, Bhumibol became the paramount political actor in the kingdom, silencing critics while winning the hearts and minds of his people. The book details this process and depicts Thailand's unique constitutional monarch—his life, his thinking, and his ruling philosophy.... | |
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| | | Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith | | Posted Wednesday, August 02, 2006 11:41:38 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained. Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Some-times I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me -- that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human -- seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that. After nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. The adjustment from city life to country dweller is something of a shock -- Taylor is one of the only professional women in the community -- but small-town life offers many of its own unique joys. Taylor has five successful years that see significant growth in the church she serves, but ultimately she finds herself experiencing "compassion fatigue" and wonders what exactly God has called her to do. She realizes that in order to keep her faith she may have to leave. Taylor describes a rich spiritual journey in which God has given her more questions than answers. As she becomes part of the flock instead of the shepherd, she describes her poignant and sincere struggle to regain her footing in the world without her defining collar. Taylor's realization that this may in fact be God's surprising path for her leads her to a refreshing search to find Him in new places. Leaving Church will remind even the most skeptical among us that life is about both disappointment and hope -- and ultimately, renewal. ... | |
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| | | An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Vintage) | | Posted Saturday, July 29, 2006 9:41:41 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | In Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist, turned a mirror on the creativity so often associated with mental illness. In this book she turns that mirror on herself. With breathtaking honesty she tells of her own manic depression, the bitter costs of her illness, and its paradoxical benefits: "There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness.... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality." This is one of the best scientific autobiographies ever written, a combination of clarity, truth, and insight into human character. "We are all, as Byron put it, differently organized," Jamison writes. "We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities." Jamison's ability to live fully within her limitations is an inspiration to her fellow mortals, whatever our particular burdens may be. --Mary Ellen Curtin... | |
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| | | My Life in and out of the Rough: The Truth Behind All That Bull**** You Think You Know About Me | | Posted Wednesday, July 26, 2006 7:41:36 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Ever since his astonishing victory in the 1991 PGA Championship, John Daly, known affectionately on the PGA Tour as "Big 'Un," has enthralled fans with his big drives, bigger personality, and "Grip It and Rip It" approach to golf -- and to life. Long John, usually seen with a Marlboro Light dangling from his lip, is the unchained, unpredictable, unapologetic bad boy of professional golf. "The only rules I follow," JD likes to say, "are the Rules of Golf." Daly's play-it-as-it-lays approach drives My Life in and out of the Rough, a thrillingly -- and sometimes shockingly -- candid memoir of a larger-than-life athlete battling assorted addictions (alcohol, gambling, chocolate, sex), his weight, and, perhaps worst of all, divorce lawyers. (He's been married four times.) A two-time major winner before he turned thirty, John Daly is one of the most popular athletes in the world. Taking readers with him off the fairway and into his $1.5-million motor home for a rollicking ride through his life -- an ever-churning world of booze, burgers, casinos, country music, and breathtaking moonshots -- Daly reveals how a down-home Everyman from Arkansas managed to rise to the peak of the golf world, escape from the depths of abject depression, and, finally, take control of his life. Well, sort of. ... | |
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