Book Description
"A stunningly beautiful new memoir…a near-perfect work of literature."—Stephen Elliot, San Francisco Chronicle
"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."
Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other. With a new postscript for the paperback edition.
Customer Reviews:
Having lived on the streets of Las Vegas..........2007-10-14
I can tell you that this author has embellished little. I avoid four letter words in my books simply because I think they distract. Nevertheless, I understand Flynn's reasoning here, and at least for me, the language in this book was palatable. What I found most interesting about this work was how different street living is in Boston compared to Las Vegas and East Los Angeles. Then East LA is a 24/7 war zone. While Boston and Las Vegas are similar in the fact that it's the police in these two cities you had better be wary and respectfully of; in East LA, as bad as the police are, badges are a welcome sight compared to MS-13.
The blurb doesn't live up to the contents.......2007-10-05
The assertion a life worth writing about by an individual who can write well proves to be simply that, an assertion. Flynn's talents (?) are mediocre, the book tiresome, repetitive and unfortunately like most of the other 'my childhood was the pits' by which I mean it may self serve the author.
None of the characters were likeable despite being deeply flawed (which often makes the person likeable).
I doubt Flynn's daddy was worth writing about.
It's done now.
Do yourself a favour. Spend your money on a more worthy book - that's just about any other book so the choice is massive.
As for Flynn being a poet, that is still open for debate. If his prose is at all similar to his poetics, his poetry would suck.
Good memoir.......2007-09-21
Good, effective memoir/story of the author's father's struggle with homelessness and alcohol and drug use. Very well-written and compelling. A good read.
I really liked this book!.......2007-08-30
I was very interested in the title of this book and when I picked it up, on further examination, I had to read it. It was a fast read for me.
A fascinating take on fathers & sons.......2007-08-23
I was directed to this strange book because of another recommended work here at Amazon. Much to my surprise, I absolutely enjoyed this strange twilight or maybe it's--"permanent midnight " ? view of a mixed-up and gifted son looking at his life from all these bizarre angles.
One being the fact that the son, (here the author himself) as a young adult, ends up taking a job at a homeless shelter and in a voyeuristic vision into his own possible future, sizes up the very man who brought him into the world as he wanders his bleary-eyed way into that very shelter one late, inebriated evening.
Chilling depictions like this, along with Flynn's dark-humored view of his father in all of his guises (house-painter, check-forger, would-be writer, etc.) keeps you turning the pages. At its core is the fact that all this grit is true. And as a memoir, it is so beautifully rendered and it's one that's so worth reading. (surpasses the James Frey, Augusten Burroughs fare by a long-shot!)
Book Description
Arguably the most controversial young African-American artist working today, Kara Walker creates vivid and shocking evocations, rooted in stereotypes, of an antebellum world that comments on the system of slavery and its continuing legacy in the American consciousness. In her choice of black cut-paper silhouettes, Walker takes a medium that was extremely fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as part of the neoclassical revival, when the silhouetted images on ancient Greek and Roman vases were emulated on such goods as Wedgwood ware. The silhouette was a parlor art practiced by genteel ladies and gentlemen, who created portraits, landscapes, and decorative motifs. There were also traveling silhouettists who took their craft around the country. The 18th- and 19th-century silhouette was also associated with the pseudo-science of physiognomy, which held that one could analyze psychological and racial types by studying profiles. Adopting the antiquated medium of the silhouette, Walker has turned it into a powerful force to evoke the complexities of the system of slavery, exploring themes of exploitation, accommodation, and complicity on the part of both the powerful and the oppressed. Pictures From Another Time is the first major publication on the work of this extraordinary artist. It includes nearly 70 examples of her work, including her silhouettes, prints, drawings, projected installations, and watercolors. Texts include an interview with the artist by curator Thelma Golden, Deputy Director of Programs at The Studio Museum in Harlem; and essays by literary critic Robert Reid-Pharr, Professor of English at the City University of New York and Annette Dixon, Curator of Western Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Customer Reviews:
I'm not an Art critic or Artist, & I never buy art books..........2003-11-10
I'm just a regular Joe who doesn't even know that much about art (I never even had an undergraduate class in art appreciation or art history). I first saw Kara Walker's art on a PBS special and was so moved by her work and her methods, I purchased this book. The images in this book are more graphic, more arresting, and more provoking than the ones shown on TV. I opened this book as soon as I received it from Amazon, yet, I had to keep looking away at times because some of the compositions are so heartbreaking. As a minority myself, I don't think I suffer too much from white guilt about racial and historical prejudice, yet just the intensity of emotion and presentation of her juxtapositions are painful and exhilirating. "Genius" is a word I approach with skepticism because of it's over use these days (c'mon can Eminem REALLY be a genius?) but very often as I turned the pages in this collection and was stopped by images that begged contemplation, the word genius occurred to me over and over again.
I took off one star for the essays, NOT for Kara Walker's art. I doubt it, but maybe I will get around to reading the essays. They intrude upon the presentation of the work, at times, which is slightly annoying. I guess they help you put the artist's work into historical, aesthetic context blah, blah, blah. I'm sure the more educated appreciate the inclusions of the essays, but I think her works speaks loads by itself. Which, ideally, is how art should affect us (us="the great unwashed masses without any special knowledge"), isn't it?
Pictures From Another Time.......2003-02-26
Upon its publication, this was the most complete volume on Kara Walker that I had come across. The essays are well written and informative, and delve deeper into various aspects of the artist's work than had previous reviews which often focus solely on the racial controversy of Walker's work. The interview with Thelma Golden provides some insight into possible future directions that Walker contemplates with her work. The images and color plates included in the book are of high quality and are representative of much of Walker's work, not only her installation at the University of Michigan.
Book Description
In the 1960s, Mississippi was the heart of white southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. To many, it was a backward-looking society of racist authoritarianism and violence that was sorely out of step with modern liberal America. White Mississippians, however, had a different vision of themselves and their country, one so persuasive that by 1980 they had become important players in Ronald Reagan's newly ascendant Republican Party.
In this ambitious reassessment of racial politics in the deep South, Joseph Crespino reveals how Mississippi leaders strategically accommodated themselves to the demands of civil-rights activists and the federal government seeking to end Jim Crow, and in so doing contributed to a vibrant conservative countermovement. Crespino explains how white Mississippians linked their fight to preserve Jim Crow with other conservative causes--with evangelical Christians worried about liberalism infecting their churches, with cold warriors concerned about the Communist threat, and with parents worried about where and with whom their children were schooled. Crespino reveals important divisions among Mississippi whites, offering the most nuanced portrayal yet of how conservative southerners bridged the gap between the politics of Jim Crow and that of the modern Republican South.
This book lends new insight into how white Mississippians gave rise to a broad, popular reaction against modern liberalism that recast American politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century.
Average customer rating:
- A real eye opener.
- A real eye opener.
- An observation of economic division in the South, 1861-1865.
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War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion
Wayne K. Durrill
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country
ASIN: 0195089235 |
Book Description
In this book Durrill describes in graphic detail the disintegration, during the Civil War, of Southern plantation society in a North Carolina coastal county. He details struggles among planters, slaves, yeoman farmers, and landless white laborers, as well as a guerrilla war and a clash between two armies that, in the end, destroyed all that remained of the county's social structure. He examines the failure of a planter-yeoman alliance, and discusses how yeoman farmers and landless white laborers allied themselves against planters, but to no avail. He also shows how slaves, when refugeed upcountry, tried unsuccessfully to reestablish their prerogatives--a subsistence, as well as protection from violence--owed them as a minimal condition of their servitude.
Customer Reviews:
A real eye opener........2001-07-03
I found this to be the best civil war documentation so far for this region. My own research turned up a great great uncle who fought for the Union Army after my great great grandfather was imprisoned. The Unionist side has never been told as well as Durrill's studies have brought it to light. Too much time has been spent studying the great battles, but the Battle of Plymouth ranks right up there in importance. How many yankees think that all southerners agreed and fought for the south, only God knows. They should read this one.
A real eye opener........2001-07-03
I found this to be the best civil war documentation so far for this region. My own research turned up a great great uncle who fought for the Union Army after my great great grandfather was imprisoned. The Unionist side has never been told as well as Durrill's studies have brought it to light. Too much time has been spent studying the great battles, but the Battle of Plymouth ranks right up there in importance. How many yankees think that all southerners agreed and fought for the south, only God knows. They should read this one.
An observation of economic division in the South, 1861-1865........1999-03-11
A book not fully appreciated without a first hand knowledge of the Albemarle region of North Carolina, Mr. Durrill certainly delves into the (sometimes remote) interests of social historians. The author chose as the location for his study, a small town inside a very rural county in North Carolina. The town, Plymouth, located in Washington County, was not only a military objective of two opposing armies, but a focus of division between many economic classes. Mr Durrill presents the county very accurately as a region of very rich and very poor struggling for political and social power during the period immediately prior and during the 1861-1865 war. Presented as a war within a war, the book documents many conflicts betweeen planters and yeoman farmers, between civilians and soldiers, and not most inconsequentially, between armies. Tracing the removal of the planters' slave labor forces from the Albemarle region behind Confederate lines and showing the effects of a social upheaval, the author has shown the importance of all classes of people in maintaining the inequities of the Southern agricultural antebellum economy. Wayne Durrill has presented the economic ideals that each social group manipulated in their own interests through the war years, and shown how ideals changed with each advance or retreat of a military force.
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Manifesto for Another World: Voices from Beyond the Dark (Open Media)
Ariel Dorfman
Manufacturer: Seven Stories Press
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The Bone People: A Novel
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Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet
ASIN: 1583225633 |
Book Description
In this interlocking prose web of first-person testimony, novelist, poet, and playwright Ariel Dorfman relates the struggles of fifty hard-core human rights activists hailing from more than forty countries. Manifesto for Another World features the words and struggles of internationally celebrated activists including Vaclav Havel, Baltasar Garzón, Helen Prejean, and Marian Wright Edelman; and Nobel Prize Laureates the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Oscar Arias Sánchez, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, José Ramos-Horta, and Bobby Muller. Equally moving are the stories of more than thirty others, unknown and (as yet) unsung beyond their national boundaries. From their diverse voices Dorfman culls the message: freedom from persecution, and freedom of opportunity, for all.
Ariel Dorfman has been hailed by The Washington Post as a "world novelist of the first order."
Book Description
Winner of the Avery O. Craven Prize of the Organization of American HistoriansAnother Civil War explores a tumultuous era of social change in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania. Because the Union Army depended on anthracite to fuel steam-powered factories, locomotives, and battle ships, coal miners in Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Carbon Counties played a vital role in the Northern war effort. However, that role was complicated by a history of ethnic, political, and class conflicts: after years of struggle in an unsafe and unstable industry, miners expected to use their wartime economic power to win victories for themselves and their families. Yet they were denounced as traitors and draft resisters, and their strikes were broken by Federal troops. Focusing on the social and economic impact of the Civil War on a group of workers central to that war, this dramatic narrative raises important questions about industrialization and work-place conflicts in the mid-1860s, about the rise of a powerful, centralized government, and about the ties between government and industry that shaped class relations. It traces the deep, local roots of wartime strikes in the coal regions and demonstrates important links between national politics, military power, and labor organization in the years before, during, and immediately after the Civil War.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Scholarship.......2007-02-18
This study of the coal miners labor struggle in the Anthracite regions, primarily in Schuykill County, PA is well researched and most importantly well written. It also elucidates on the discrimination of the Irish during this period of "Nativism" and the "No Nothings" in the US. Extremely well documented, it will be an excellent resource for additional study of this critical period in labor history and it's impact on the Civil War.
Book Description
"Fresh, nuanced and insightful….[A] thoughtful, readable contribution to the immigration debates. —Houston Chronicle
Spanning four continents and several years in the lives of seven immigrant families, The New Americans is at once the most globe-trotting and intimate introduction to the new American immigration. Emmy award-winning journalist Rubén Martínez's "powerful and perceptive chronicle" (Booklist) lyrically recounts the dramatic voyages and day-to-day experiences of a small group of families who were featured in the PBS documentary of the same name. They come from Mexico, Nigeria, Palestine, India, and the Dominican Republic, and wind up in Chicago, Montana, Silicon Valley, and the California badlands. Their stories—told with "enthralling" (Publishers Weekly) literary skill, and illustrated with stunning portraits from award-winning photographer Joseph Rodriguez—paint a portrait of the new, multicultural America.
Martínez weaves his own family's moving immigrant history into the book, and essays on the films of Indian American director Mira Nair, the contemporary corridos of Mexican border musicians Los Tigres del Norte, and other immigrant artists explore the ways the new immigrant culture is transforming the United States.
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Another Place: An Ecocritical Study of Selected Western American Poets
Andrew Elkins
Manufacturer: Texas Christian University Press
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 087565259X |
Customer Reviews:
Beautiful Pictures for the American Time Traveler.......2004-09-29
As a reader I could tell that the author loves the subject. He includes pictures most of the great tourist attractions and many of the not so great ones. This is a fun book to read. Not a heavy piece of reading - but very informative - from several angles - historical, business, and travel. I have read other books by the author and am impressed with all of them. The layout and art direction of the book serves the subject well. I can see this book going into more editions. The size of the book is swell - big enuf for big pictures - small enuf to handle in "tight spots."
a fun read.......2001-01-03
John Margolies is a man with a passion for popular culture. Not only has he written this book but he's also written books on the American travel brochure, the roadmap, gas stations, motels, roadsigns and miniature golf. His books are a worthy addition to any library. Not only is he a photographer but he is also an excellent writer, with warmth and affection for his subject.
True to its name.......2000-08-18
Anyone who enjoys the road and its culture--past and present--will enjoy reading Fun Along the Road. It evokes great memories of those road trips of yesteryear. I own a lot of books on roadside Americana and have a few others by John Margolies. He is an excellent author and photographer. I highly recommend this book.
Great pictures and contemporary history.......1999-08-03
Margolies is a photographer, but he provides not just books of photographs but well-written contemporary history to go with them.
This book is about roadside attractions, some long gone, some still hanging on, and some thriving. It inspired me to spend two weeks driving all over Florida trying to catch some of these places before they vanish forever.
Miniature golf, a favorite subject of the author, gets special coverage.
This book and his previous Home Away From Home are inspirational if you travel and still fascinating if you don't.
Books:
- Bitter is the New Black : Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass,Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office
- Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
- Business and Its Environment (5th Edition)
- Business and Its Environment (5th Edition)
- Business and Society: Stakeholders, Ethics, Public Policy
- Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World with CD-ROM
- Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
- Catholic Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism
- Charging Ahead: The Growth and Regulation of Payment Card Markets
Books Index
Books Home
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- Heaven
- Vitruvius: 'Ten Books on Architecture'
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- Doubly Labelled Water - Theory and Practice
- Job Analysis: Methods, Research, and Applications for Human Resource Management in the New Millenniu
- Grime and Punishment
- The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles
- Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture
- Alpine Wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains
Possible Side Effects
A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember
Magical Thinking : True Stories
Sellevision: A Novel
Dry: A Memoir
