January 2007
Monthly Archive
Wed 31 Jan 2007
He’s one of America’s most recognizable and acclaimed actors: a star on Broadway, an Oscar nominee for The Aviator, and the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing, during his 11 years on M*A*S*H. Now Alan Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances.
“My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six,” begins Alda’s irresistible story. The son of a popular actor and a loving but mentally ill mother, he spent his early childhood backstage in the erotic and comic world of burlesque and went on, after early struggles, to achieve extraordinary success in his profession.
Yet Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is not a memoir of show-business ups and downs. It is a moving and funny story of a boy growing into a man who then realizes he has only just begun to grow.
It is the story of turning points in Alda’s life, events that would make him what he is, if only he could survive them.
From the moment as a boy when his dead dog is returned from the taxidermist’s shop with a hideous expression on his face, and he learns that death can’t be undone, to the decades-long effort to find compassion for the mother he lived with but never knew, to his acceptance of his father, both personally and professionally, Alda learns the hard way that change, uncertainty, and transformation are what life is made of, and true happiness is found in embracing them.
Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, filled with curiosity about nature, good humor, and honesty, is the crowning achievement of an actor, author, and director, but surprisingly, it is the story of a life more filled with turbulence and laughter than any Alda has ever played on the stage or screen.
Tags: never have your dog stuffed: and other things i’ve learned, alan alda, arts & entertainment, bios & memoirs, mash, m*a*s*h, aviator, actor, broadway
Tue 30 Jan 2007
Todd Belknap, a legendary field agent for Consular Operations with a reputation as a cowboy, is cut loose from the agency after an operation goes wrong. At the same time, Jared Rinehart, his best friend and fellow agent, is abducted in Lebanon by a militia group with a vicious reputation. When the government refuses to either rescue Rinehart or negotiate for his release, Belknap decides to take matters into his own hands.
Meanwhile, hedge-fund analyst Andrea Bancroft gets a surprising call. She is to receive $12 million from a cousin she never met, but with one condition: she must agree to sit on the board of the Bancroft family foundation, a charitable organization that is run by the family patriarch, Paul Bancroft. Having never been involved with, or even having met, her family (her mother was briefly married to a Bancroft and cut off all contact years ago) Andrea is intrigued. But the foundation, which is dedicated to doing strategic good deeds, appears less and less benign the more deeply involved she gets. What exactly is their involvement with the “Genesis”, a mysterious individual working to destabilize the geopolitical balance at the risk of millions of lives? As events escalate, Todd Belknap and Andrea Bancroft come together and must form an uneasy alliance if they are to uncover the truth behind “Genesis” before it is too late.
Tags: the bancroft strategy, robert ludlum, mysteries & thrillers, field agent, operation, consular operations, agency, todd belknap, jared rinehart, andrea bancroft, paul bancroft, foundation, family, lebanon, militia group, abduction, friend, board, charity, organization, geopolitics, lives, alliance, genesis
Other books by the same author:
Mon 29 Jan 2007
Posted by James McBride under
FictionNo Comments
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and compassionately render the lives of those who marched.
The author of Ragtime, City of God, and The Book of Daniel has given us a magisterial work with an enormous cast of unforgettable characters: white and black, men, women, and children, unionists and rebels, generals and privates, freed slaves and slave owners. At the center is General Sherman himself; a beautiful freed slave girl named Pearl; a Union regimental surgeon, Colonel Sartorius; Emily Thompson, the dispossessed daughter of a Southern judge; and Arly and Will, two misfit soldiers.
Almost hypnotic in its narrative drive, The March stunningly renders the countless lives swept up in the violence of a country at war with itself. The great march in E.L. Doctorow’s hands becomes something more, a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.
Tags: the march, e.l. doctorow, fiction, general sherman, atlanta, civil war, colonel sartorius,
Sun 28 Jan 2007
This is the story of Despereaux Tilling, a mouse in love with music, stories, and a princess named Pea. It is also the story of a rat called Roscuro, who lives in darkness but covets a world filled with light. And it is the story of Miggery Sow, a slow-witted serving girl with a simple, impossible wish. These characters are about to embark on a journey that will lead them down into a horrible dungeon, up into a glittering castle, and ultimately, into each other’s lives.
And what happens then?
Listener, it is your destiny to find out.
Tags: the tale of despereaux, kate dicamillo, education, fiction, k-12 educators, kids, parents & family, mouse, newbery medal, award winner, children’s book award, audible select, audible selects
Other books by the same author:
Sat 27 Jan 2007
From Alan Furst, best-selling author of Blood of Victory and Dark Voyage, comes a thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts’ passion to fight in the war against tyranny.
Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers’ hotel. But this is no romantic tragedy, it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini’s fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine emigre newspaper. Carlo Weisz, a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor.
Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Surete, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance or blackmail or murder.
The story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the back streets of Berlin, The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best, taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes listeners through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.
Tags: the foreign correspondent, alan furst, mysteries & thrillers, world war ii, facism, musollini, intelligence, paris, nazi, germany
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