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  The Blessing - A Memoir

  Gregory Orr

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  An acclaimed poet’s “gripping” memoir of an accidental tragedy, a childhood haunted by guilt, and a quest to find healing through art (Publishers Weekly). 
   
  When Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. From the immediate aftermath—a period of shock, sadness, and isolation—it quickly became clear that support and guidance would not be coming from his distant mother. Nor would it come from his father, a philandering country doctor addicted to amphetamines. Left to his own devices, the boy suffered. 
   
  Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. As a young man, his feelings and a growing sense of idealism prompted him to activism in the civil rights movement, where he marched and was imprisoned, and then scarred again by a terrifying abduction. Eventually, Orr’s experiences led him to understand that art, particularly poetry, could work as a powerful source of healing and meaning to combat the trauma he carried. 
   
  Throughout The Blessing, Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art. 
   
  “Even a chaotic and hapless family, it seems, can confer a blessing—the strength to live in the world as it is, and the wisdom to love people as they are. The book is not so much about surviving pain so much as developing a writer’s instinct for transforming it.” —Kathleen Norris, New York Times–bestselling author of The Cloister Walk

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  The Chief Justiceship of William...

  Jonathan Lurie

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  A study of the Supreme Court tenure of the only US president to serve as chief justice provides a unique perspective on 1920s America. In this book, Jonathan Lurie offers a comprehensive examination of the Supreme Court tenure of the only person to have held the offices of president of the United States and chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. William Howard Taft joined the Court during the Jazz Age and the era of prohibition, a period of disillusion and retreat from the idealism reflected during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Lurie considers how conservative trends at this time were reflected in key decisions of Taft’s court. Although Taft was considered an undistinguished chief executive, such a characterization cannot be applied to his tenure as chief justice. Lurie demonstrates that Taft’s leadership on this tribunal, matched by his productive relations with Congress, in effect created the modern Supreme Court. Furthermore he draws on the unpublished letters Taft wrote to his three children, Robert, Helen, and Charles, generally once a week. His missives contain an intriguing mixture of family news, insights concerning contemporaneous political issues, and occasional commentary on his fellow justices and cases under consideration. Lurie structures his study in parallel with the eight full terms in which Taft occupied the center seat, examining key decisions while avoiding legal jargon wherever possible. The high point of Taft’s chief justiceship was the period from 1921 to 1925. The second part of his tenure was marked by slow decline as his health worsened with each passing year. By 1930 he was forced to resign, and his death soon followed. In an epilogue Lurie explains why Taft is still regarded as an outstanding chief justice—if not a great jurist—and why this distinction is important. “Conflicts from the early twentieth century endure, and Lurie gives us old and new perspectives from which to understand a living Constitution.” —Journal of American History

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  Appetite For Dysfunction - A...

  Vicky L Hamilton

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  Vicky Hamilton became the top female record company executive and personal band manager. Only to reach her aspirations while working with Guns N’ Roses, to then take on the most coveted A&R position to date at Geffen Records, under David Geffen himself. It was common knowledge, that while David Geffen was relaxing at his Malibu beach house, Hamilton was busy scouring dark clubs for talent. Doing the kind of legwork many larger record labels had gotten away from. 
   
  Appetite For Dysfunction is the first time Vicky candidly speaks out about the life she lived on the front lines, deep in the heartless world of the music business. Hamilton brings to this book her unbiased observations and shrewd glimpses about who these rock stars and executives are at the core of their beings, and about herself, as well. She expresses her gratitude for her historic past and her accomplishments, as well as her own shortcomings along the way. She shares her victories, her mistakes, the horror stories, and her dark comedic approach to “making it” in the entertainment business. Even while getting her heart broken on many occasions, leading to some cataclysmic breakdowns, Vicky battles to hang on to her integrity. Painfully taking the highroad, as she loses her job at Capitol Records, while facing eviction and a phone that suddenly stopped ringing, Vicky holds her head high, humbly reinvents herself, and literally, goes on with the show. 
   
  Appetite For Dysfunction is a self-exploratory journey through Vicky’s life. A small town girl who risks everything by dropping out of art school, leaving behind the safety of loved ones and small town values, and making her way to Hollywood. When Vicky arrived, she landed a job as a mere record store clerk, to then miraculously find herself deep in the trenches of an unscrupulous, male dominated, music entertainment business, and blossomed into Hollywood’s most controversial A&R woman and band manager.

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  Renaissance Woman - The Life of...

  Ramie Targoff

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  Ramie Targoff's Renaissance Woman tells of the most remarkable woman of the Italian Renaissance: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara.Vittoria has long been celebrated by scholars of Michelangelo as the artist's best friend—the two of them exchanged beautiful letters, poems, and works of art that bear witness to their intimacy—but she also had close ties to Charles V, Pope Clement VII and Pope Paul III, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, Queen Marguerite de Navarre, Reginald Pole, and Isabella d'Este, among others.Vittoria was the scion of an immensely powerful family in Rome during that city's most explosively creative era. Art and literature flourished, but political and religious life were under terrific strain. Personally involved with nearly every major development of this period—through both her marriage and her own talents—Vittoria was not only a critical political actor and negotiator but also the first woman to publish a book of poems in Italy, an event that launched a revolution for Italian women's writing.Vittoria was, in short, at the very heart of what we celebrate when we think about sixteenth-century Italy; through her story the Renaissance comes to life anew.

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  Carve Her Name with Pride

  R J Minney

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  The thrilling and inspiring true story of Violette Szabo, the fearless British cloak-and-dagger agent who infiltrated Nazi occupied France.   Switchboard operator and volunteer for the Women’s Land Army, Violette Szabo was only twenty-two years old when her husband, Etienne, a captain in the French Foreign Legion, died at El Alamein. His death only made the resilient young widow more determined than ever to join England’s war effort in World War II. To Violette’s surprise, opportunity came at the request of Britain’s Special Organization Executive.   The purpose of the SOE was to conduct sabotage and espionage, and to aide local resistance movements in occupied Europe. Trained in secret in the Scottish Highlands, Violette became an expert in fieldcraft, covert navigation, and weapons and demolition. Then, on June 7, 1944, Szabo parachuted into Limoges. Her task was to coordinate the work of the French Resistance in the first days after D-Day. Violette Szabo was about to make history.   “Violette’s bravery and spirit shine throughout” this arresting true story of a heroic woman, undaunted by her missions, or the reality of the fate that would most likely await her in the closing years of war. R. J. Minney’s stirring historical narrative was the basis for the classic 1959 film starring Virginia Mckenna and Paul Scofield (Portland Book Review).

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  The Quiet Spy

  Anonymous Anonymous

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  The shocking true story of a young woman forced into spying for Russia under the KBG. What would make you agree to work as a KGB agent? Love, blackmail, desperation? For this young woman, there is only one thing that could make her agree to a life of service under the brutal regime that she hates. They took her baby. So begins the most compelling and revealing story about spying you're ever likely to hear. Struggling through a life of poverty, a young woman finds herself in the relative safety of employment as a chambermaid. But everything changes when she falls for a man who betrays her. Pregnant and vulnerable, she is blackmailed into life as an agent by a brutal totalitarian state, one which never cared about the rights of any individual, especially women. With no interest in helping communism, she becomes driven by an obsessive desire to track down her stolen child. 
  From sleeping with the enemy to smearing the Soviet Union's oldest foes. From infiltrating the upper echelons of London high society, to hunting runaway Nazis, this is the true and secret life of an undercover Russian agent inside Britain. Finally free, and safely undercover, The Quiet Spy strips away all the veils of secrecy to vividly reconstruct her bizarre life of danger, love and intrigue.

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