'Gloriously funny . . . unfailingly entertaining' – Mail on Sunday 'What worlds she's seen, what a life she's had – at long last, the memoirs of the fearless, witty, indomitable Ann Leslie' – Deborah Moggach She has been shot at by Bosnian snipers, been pursued by Robert Mugabe’s notorious secret police, filed from the North Korean border, propositioned by both Salvador Dali and David Niven and been driven maniacally through London by Steve McQueen. But Ann Leslie’s life is every bit as remarkable as her career. A daughter of the Raj, she was born in India and the strongest influence on her early life was an illiterate Pashtun bearer, who saved her life during Partition. Her mother, a great beauty, was indifferent to her eldest daughter and she was sent to the first of a series of boarding-schools aged just four, eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford. After graduating she began her career at the Manchester office of the Daily Express, where the news editor took an instant dislike to her - she was a southerner, educated and – worst of all – female. Despite his best efforts she was soon given her own column. Then, after a stint covering show business she was appointed Foreign Correspondent of the Daily Mail, an association that endures today, almost forty years later, and one which finally allowed her real talent to shine through. Killing My Own Snakes is a witty, incident-filled account of an extraordinary life, a fascinating self-portrait of one the most influential journalists of our time.
This is not a biography of John Harvey Sorrells. I expect there'll never be one of those, and that's probably just as well. Sometimes I think a writer's work is his own best autobiography, certainly, and as much biography as he needs. But I'm doing this because of two things: one simple, the other far from it. My late oldest brother, John, sent me a couple of boxes back in 1993 chock-a-block with manuscript and newspaper printed "stuff" written by our father. I looked through it quickly and was intrigued right away, but didn't have the time to do anything with it. Over a period of about a year I managed to root around considerably more--along with my son, daughter, and wife--and eventually I knew I'd have to mess with it in a much more formal and intentional way. But that was the simple part: reading all the material; lifting this bit from here and combining it with that shard from there to create a whole that didn't injure the narra-tive; deciding to stick with the newspaperman's spellings of words like thru, and cigaret, along with standard newspaper punctuation; deciding how to include not just the "best" stuff, but the typical as well. All that simply comes with the turf of editing someone else's material. The much harder part, though, was the realization that I was in some ways on a fool's errand. My father died about five weeks before his fifty-second birthday. At the time, we were living in New York City. That is, my parents were. I was the youngest of four children; fifteen; and, with my older brother, Bill, a high school student in Virginia. In spite of its rampant self-absorption, crudities, cynicisms, vulgarities, and erupting juices of sexuality, fifteen is a tender age. Maybe vulnerable is more accurate. In any event, it's an age when a boy--even a boy/man--really needs his father. It's a fragile time, because the boy coming into manhood is coming into a period when he's just about ready to start knowing his father as another man, as a person, as a human being, as a wonderfully imperfect critter he can love in a way that transcends the boy/Dad relationship. It's always going to be father/son, but when the two are adults, that relationship changes, deepens, transforms. At least, that's what I've seen and heard from those who got to go through it, and as I've experienced it from the father side with my own son. But I was suddenly and unexpectedly cut off from that chance. One night my father was alive, sitting at a card table in the living room reading, as I recall my mother telling it--likely a mystery novel--in the apartment in New York, when he got bushwhacked by a massive heart attack. My mother, who was in their bedroom in the rear of the apartment, said she heard some-thing fall. Hurrying out to see what had happened, she found him on the floor. She knelt by him and said he kept looking up at her asking, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" as though something had happened to her. Within five minutes he was dead. What these days might be called a lack of "closure" absolutely overwhelmed me, and one way or another I have been looking for my father ever since. One way or another his wrenching disappearance has informed virtually everything I myself have ever written. So when I saw the mass of stuff in those boxes my brother sent me, I was againcon-sciously for the first time in years--on the gossamer trail of my father, hoping to find out some-thing, trying to learn something, circling like a dog before she flops, anxious to discover some-hing that would do . . . what? Easy: It would let me know my father just as though he hadn't died when I was a boy; just as though he hadn't been a-moldering in a Graceland Cemetery grave in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, for more than forty-five years. . . . While all that was going on, another part of me was looking at the stuff, fascinated by the man's insights, intrigued with how his mind worked, embarrassed by his p
The author recounts his more than 6,500-mile journey across America, during which he visited the sites of famous rock star deaths and experienced philosophical changes of perspective.
Leonard Cord was a rough, tough cowboy turned bounty hunter, but he cleaned up real well. Dress pants and jacket and polished boots and he was comfortable anywhere. Cord hunted people or things for money. He hunted outlaws, runaways, missing kids, or missing valuables. He preferred San Francisco when he was not chasing people for money. Currently his cash was getting short, and he was going to have to do some hunting Wanted posters were his normal job notices. Posters for $500 to $1,000 for an individual in California, Nevada, or Arizona were best. Sometimes adds in local papers also gave him job opportunities. Wells Fargo was also a job source, and a quick visit to the local Wells Fargo office gave him a job offer. They offered him $1,000 to pick up a consignment in Sacramento and transfer it to San Francisco. It sounded like a super payday. He did not know that the consignment was a twenty-year-old hell cat woman who tried to knife him and would make his life hell across four western states. His life would be changed forever.
The Enchanted Hill is a western novel by famous author Peter B. Kyne. He was born and died in San Francisco, California. More than 100 films were adapted into screenplays. Kyne created the character of Cappy Ricks in a series of novels. Excerpt: "San Onofre was accustomed to silence. It was a flag station in the heart of El Valle de los Ojos Negros, and over it and the cattle corrals and loading chute, the complaining windmill and a five-thousand-gallon water-tank kept guard. It boasted neither station agent nor station loafers; even the trains did not stop there to take on water, for the windmill and tank had been erected by the railroad company to supply water to the transient herds of cattle held in the corrals for car shipment, and for the horses and men who drove the cattle thither. Hence, except on those occasions when the cow-men who ranged in El Valle de los Ojos Negros and the public grazing lands in the forest reserve to the north and northeast drove their beef cattle in for shipment, no human voice competed in San Onofre with the zephyr, the grasshoppers, the crows and the woodpecker..."
The Archbishop of Canterbury called him 'bloody rude', courtiers feared he was 'a foreign interloper out for the goodies', daughter-in-law Sarah Ferguson found him 'very frightening' and the Queen Mother labelled him 'the Hun'. Journalists have continually portrayed him as a gaffe-prone serial philanderer, with European outlets going way off-piste and claiming he has fathered 24 illegitimate children. Prince Philip says 'the impression the public has got is unfair', though there is no self-serving autobiography and his interviews with broadcasters or writers are done grudgingly. The Duke sets out to explore the man behind the various myths, drawing on interviews with relations, friends and courtiers and the Duke's own words. It brings to life some rare aspects of his character, from a love of poetry and religion to his fondness for Duke Ellington and his fascination with UFOs. It also explains why for over seven decades he has been the Queen's 'strength and stay' – and why he is regarded by many as a national treasure.
The bestselling (and first) shared-world phenomenon returns with an epic novel of the hate and the history of the infamous city of Sanctuary. "Brilliantly conceived."--C.J. Cherryh.
Ambition will fuel him. Competition will drive him. But power has its price. It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined - every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute . . . and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This “excellent, all-embracing” (The New York Times) biography of Queen Elizabeth II is a magisterial study of the woman known only from a distance—and a captivating window into her decades-long reign. From the moment of her ascension to the throne in 1952 at the age of twenty-five, Queen Elizabeth II was the object of unparalleled scrutiny. But through the fog of glamour and gossip, how well did we really know the world’s most famous monarch? Drawing on numerous interviews and never-before-revealed documents, acclaimed biographer Sally Bedell Smith pulls back the curtain to show in intimate detail the public and private lives of Queen Elizabeth II, who led her country and Commonwealth through the wars and upheavals of the last twentieth and twenty-first centuries with unparalleled composure, intelligence, and grace. In Elizabeth the Queen, we meet the young girl who suddenly becomes “heiress presumptive” when her uncle abdicates the throne. We meet the thirteen-year-old Lilibet as she falls in love with a young navy cadet named Philip and becomes determined to marry him, even though her parents prefer wealthier English aristocrats. We see the teenage Lilibet repairing army trucks during World War II and standing with Winston Churchill on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on V-E Day. We see the young Queen struggling to balance the demands of her job with her role as the mother of two young children. Sally Bedell Smith brings us inside the palace doors and into the Queen’s daily routines—the “red boxes” of documents she reviewed each day, the weekly meetings she had with twelve prime ministers, her physically demanding tours abroad, and the constant scrutiny of the press—as well as her personal relationships: with her husband, Prince Philip, the love of her life; her children and their often-disastrous marriages; her grandchildren and friends.
