Pete Friesen trusted his intuition and employed his skills to create a lifetime filled with extraordinary achievements. Born in post-revolutionary Russia and raised on the Canadian prairie during the Great Depression, Friesen overcame challenging odds and found his way to the pinnacle of engineering success in the United States. As noted by Peter Rowlands, who was involved in production of Friesens bio-documentary Pete: Moving Man Made Mountains, Pete Friesen considered life on earth to be an adventure where every challenge and every failure was a learning experience. With little formal education, he became an inventor and innovator who moved more than four thousand buildings in his structural-moving career. Possessing the ability to visualize resolution of complex problems, Friesen designed machinery and developed procedures that propelled his chosen profession into the modern age. Rowlands chronicles Friesens fascinating life from beginning to endfrom a turbulent childhood through inventions and innovations to international acclaimcreating a fitting memoir and an unforgettable tribute to a man who lived by his credo of hopeto never, never give up.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, VULTURE, PEOPLE, BOSTON GLOBE, VANITY FAIR, ESQUIRE, & MORE “Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism… In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”—New York Times Book Review For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water. This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to “the secrets.” In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe “the secrets” are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
This highly-visual book introduces an effective new method to learn over 1,000 Japanese kanji characters using visual stimuli and pictographs. Learning the fundamental kanji characters used to write Japanese can be challenging, but this book is designed to speed up learning by presenting the 1,000 most common characters using a mnemonic approach. In a fun and accessible way to learn Japanese, each kanji is associated with memorable visual and verbal clues. For example, the Japanese character for person is superimposed over a sketch of a smiling man. The visual clue is "a person standing on two legs." By seeing the distinctive shape of the kanji, learners create a mental image of its meaning. Each character is presented as part of a group of characters which share similar traits. These groups use common root symbols known as radicals; they are also categorized by themes such as colors, numbers, animals, or body parts. Pronunciations, meanings and common vocabulary compounds are provided for each character in the group. Mnemonic clues are also given for the basic 92 hiragana and katakana phonetic symbols. The free audio download available online helps you learn pronunciation for all of the characters and vocabulary in this book. The introduction explains the basic history and structure of the kanji. Key feature of this Japanese kanji book include: Hiragana and katakana phonetic symbols Easy-to-remember drawings and stories for ALL characters Thousands of vocabulary words Online audio for pronunciation practice All audio content is accessible on tuttlepublishing.com/downloadable-content.
In this toe-tapping jazz tribute, the traditional "This Old Man" gets a swinging makeover, and some of the era's best musicians take center stage. The tuneful text and vibrant illustrations bop, slide, and shimmy across the page as Satchmo plays one, Bojangles plays two . . . right on down the line to Charles Mingus, who plays nine, plucking strings that sound "divine." Easy on the ear and the eye, this playful introduction to nine jazz giants will teach children to count--and will give them every reason to get up and dance! Includes a brief biography of each musician.
** New York Times Bestseller ** Animals behaving badly, other people's misfortunes and the most bizarre true crime story ever. French Fried is the unfortunately true account of Chris Dolley's first eight months in France and has been described as 'A Year in Provence with Miss Marple and Gerald Durrell.' Just when Chris and Shelagh think nothing more could possibly go wrong, they discover that Chris's identity has been stolen and their life savings - all the money from their house sale in England that was going to finance their new life in France - had disappeared. A bank account had been opened in Chris's name in Spain to take the proceeds. Then they're abandoned by the police forces of four countries who all insist the crime belongs in someone else's jurisdiction. The French say it's an Irish crime as that's where the money was held. The Irish say it's French as that's where all the correspondence came from. The British say it's nothing to do with them even though forged British passports were used to open the bank account in Spain. And the Spanish are on holiday - and can't even think about investigating any bank account for at least four weeks. So Chris has to solve the crime himself. But unlike fictional detectives he has an 80 year-old mother-in-law and an excitable puppy who insist they come along if he's going anywhere interesting - like a stakeout. REVIEWS "This was a fantastic read. It had me laughing so much that I nearly got relegated to the sofa! Once I had started reading this book, I could not put it down, I was even quite happy to miss my favourite TV programmes!" - Bookmarked "When I downloaded this book this morning, I had every intention of putting it on my phone and reading it in dribs and drabs. And now I appear to have finished the book! The best thing about 'French Fried' is it's sense of humour; warm, self-deprecating, and very British. Literally laugh out loud in several places (I'm glad I'm the only one home!)." - Librarything "Chris Dolley's humour reminds me of James Herriot at times, with my husband shushing me in the middle of the night. I could not put this book down and enjoyed it immensely. The characters, especially Nan, were life-size." - Salammi
