Other books that might interest you

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  Sicilian Gothic - The...

  Mario Tosto

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  "Most novels don't have footnotes," said a friend. True, but this one is based on real people. Carmelo and Nellie Tosto were my parents. It's a work of fiction because there wasn't enough documentable evidence to write a typical biography. 
  Unlike today, with its surfeit of personal data – photos, videos, correspondence, diaries, and the like – the period between 1901 and 1939 afforded few opportunities for lower class immigrants to leave tangible evidence of their presence. 
  Carmelo's history is sparse. His documentation originates at an institution for abandoned infants in Catania, Sicily in 1901. He grew up in a nearby fishing village and at the age of fourteen went to work as a merchant marine sailor until 1925, when he jumped ship in Baltimore to escape Mussolini's conscription.. 
  Nellie was born in Sicily but grew up from infancy in America with serious aspirations to become a Catholic nun. There's much more evidence of her early life, but her character and story needed some enhancement. 
  After diligent gleaning using powerful internet search tools, I amassed a trove of facts about them. I added whatever I could collect from personal reminiscences, family lore, and artifacts. And though it was exciting to see the early days of my long-gone parents taking shape, it was also frustrating. Like scrapbooks retrieved from a flood, the tides of time had dissolved much detail about them. As the first fruit of their convergence, I didn't know them personally until they were well into their thirties. By then, like most of us, they had changed markedly from their youthful personas. So I assembled their stories with the connective tissue of fiction, based on plausible inferences from  facts. 
  In so doing, my parents became more human, more fascinating, and more endearing than when we made each other miserable in the 1940s and 1950s. I hope this book will help you appreciate them better than I did then, and as much as I do now.

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  The Berlin Stories

  Christopher Isherwood

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  First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. Classics of modern fiction, these novellas capture 1931 Berlin—charming, grotesque, and dangerous, as Hitler was ascending to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters, in particular the nightclub performer Sally Bowles, whose misadventures were popularized on stage and screen in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.

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  The Longest Road

  Ben Cunningham

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  In June 2008 Ben Cunningham and five friends set out to cycle from Alaska to Argentina, along the Pan-American Highway, the world's longest land route. It measures 25,000 km and passes through fourteen countries and two continents, from the vast bear country of Alaska and northern Canada to the densely populated cities of Los Angeles and Lima. It moves from hot to cold, from forest to desert, English to Spanish and everything in between. In Ireland, the expedition generated national interest: it was the first time such a cycling challenge had been attempted by Irish people. An inspirational tale of adventure and endurance, of what can happen when you get on your bike.

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  Smedley Butler - The Complete...

  Brilliant Bio

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  Discover the untold story of Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history, in this gripping audiobook biography. From his daring military exploits to his shocking revelations about war and corporate corruption, Butler’s life was anything but ordinary. Listen now and uncover the truth behind the man who exposed the ‘Business Plot’—a secret coup to overthrow the U.S. government. Perfect for history buffs, military enthusiasts, and anyone who loves a real-life whistleblower story.

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  Fierce and Delicate - Essays on...

  Renee K. Nicholson

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  Renée Nicholson’s professional training in ballet had both moments of magnificence and moments of torment, from fittings of elaborate platter tutus to strange language barriers and unrealistic expectations of the body. In Fierce and Delicate, she looks back on the often confused and driven self she had been shaped into—always away from home, with friends who were also rivals, influenced by teachers in ways sometimes productive and at other times bordering on sadistic—and finds beauty in the small roles she performed. When, inevitably, Nicholson moved on from dancing, severed from her first love by illness, she discovered that she retained the lyricism and narrative of ballet itself as she negotiated life with rheumatoid arthritis. 
  An intentionally fractured memoir-in-essays, Fierce and Delicate navigates the traditional geographies of South Florida, northern Michigan, New York City, Milwaukee, West Virginia, and also geographies of the body—long, supple limbs; knee replacements; remembered bodies and actual. It is a book about the world of professional dance and also about living with chronic disease, about being shattered yet realizing the power to assemble oneself again, in a new way.

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  The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her...

  Barbara K. Lipska, Elaine McArdle

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  In January 2015, Barbara Lipska—a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness—was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia—and schizophrenia—like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, just as her doctors figured out what was happening, the immunotherapy they had prescribed began to work. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity. 
   
   
   
  In The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind, Lipska describes her extraordinary ordeal and its lessons about the mind and brain. She explains how mental illness, brain injury, and age can change our behavior, personality, cognition, and memory. She tells what it is like to experience these changes firsthand. And she reveals what parts of us remain, even when so much else is gone.

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