THE STORY: This is the love story of Ethel and Norman Thayer, who are returning to their summer home on Golden Pond for the forty-eighth year. He is a retired professor, nearing eighty, with heart palpitations and a failing memory--but still as tart-tongue
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Discover Jane Fonda, in her own words—and now experience the story of her life in the HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts. “To hold this book in your hands is to be astonished by how much living can be packed into sixty-plus years.”—Los Angeles Times America knows Jane Fonda as actress and activist, feminist and wife, workout guru and role model. In this extraordinary memoir, Fonda shows that she is much more. From her youth among Hollywood’s elite to her film career and her activism today, Fonda reveals intimate details and personal truths she hopes “can provide a lens through which others can see their lives and how they can live them a little differently.” Surprising, candid, and wonderfully written, My Life So Far is filled with insights into the personal struggles of a woman living a remarkable life. “In the process of writing this book I discovered there were clear, broad, even universal themes that ran through my life, a coherent arc to my journey that, if I could be truthful in the telling, might provide a road map for other women as they face the challenges of relationships, self-image, and forgiveness. What I did not anticipate was how my journey would also resonate with men.”—From the Introduction This eBook includes the full text of the book plus the following additional content: • 50 new photos from Jane Fonda’s personal and family archives, many often never seen in public • A free chapter from Jane Fonda’s Prime Time Praise for My Life So Far “[A] sisterly, enveloping memoir . . . an intimate, haunting book that might as well be catnip from its ever controversial author.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Terrific . . . rich . . . unexpectedly quite moving.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Fiercely intelligent, detailed, probing, rigorously revealing.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Fonda possesses a raw and affecting candor. . . . Her honesty [is] a force.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “A fearless book . . . fascinating.”—Chicago Sun-Times “Truly compelling.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Riveting.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
From bestselling author of She’s Not There, New York Times opinion columnist, and human rights activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, a memoir of the transformative power of loving dogs. This is a book about dogs: the love we have for them, and the way that love helps us understand the people we have been. It’s in the love of dogs, and my love for them, that I can best now take the measure of the child I once was, and the bottomless, unfathomable desires that once haunted me. There are times when it is hard for me to fully remember that love, which was once so fragile, and so fierce. Sometimes it seems to fade before me, like breath on a mirror. But I remember the dogs. In her New York Times opinion column, Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote about her relationship with her beloved dog Indigo, and her wise, funny, heartbreaking piece went viral. In Good Boy, Boylan explores what should be the simplest topic in the world, but never is: finding and giving love. Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman—accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. “Everything I know about love,” she writes, “I learned from dogs.” Their love enables us to pull off what seem like impossible feats: to find our way home when we are lost, to live our lives with humor and courage, and above all, to best become our true selves.
“[A] remarkably absorbing, supremely entertaining joint biography” (The New York Times) from bestselling author Scott Eyman about the remarkable friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart, two Hollywood legends who maintained a close relationship that endured all of life’s twists and turns. Henry Fonda and James Stewart were two of the biggest stars in Hollywood for forty years, but they became friends when they were unknown. They roomed together as stage actors in New York, and when they began making films in Hollywood, they were roommates again. Between them they made such classic films as The Grapes of Wrath, Mister Roberts, Twelve Angry Men, and On Golden Pond; and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, and Rear Window. They got along famously, with a shared interest in elaborate practical jokes and model airplanes, among other things. But their friendship also endured despite their differences: Fonda was a liberal Democrat, Stewart a conservative Republican. Fonda was a ladies’ man who was married five times; Stewart remained married to the same woman for forty-five years. Both men volunteered during World War II and were decorated for their service. When Stewart returned home, still unmarried, he once again moved in with Fonda, his wife, and his two children, Jane and Peter, who knew him as Uncle Jimmy. For his “breezy, entertaining” (Publishers Weekly) Hank and Jim, biographer and film historian Scott Eyman spoke with Fonda’s widow and children as well as three of Stewart’s children, plus actors and directors who had worked with the men—in addition to doing extensive archival research to get the full details of their time together. This is not just another Hollywood story, but “a fascinating…richly documented biography” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) of an extraordinary friendship that lasted through war, marriages, children, careers, and everything else.
A revealing, authorized biography of the star describes his long stage and film career, personal life and relationship with his children, friendships, and early life. Teichmann uses Henry Fonda's taped reminiscences, along with testimony from wives, kids, and friends. Fonda's private life and theater work are the focus, with much less film lore; and his problematic personality does emerge--genial, upright, yet workaholic and closed-off emotionally. But Hank's own voice is here--from touchingly timid to chilly and flinty--enough to make this a solid, endearing semi-memoir . . . especially for those who share Fonda's view of himself as a stage actor first and foremost.
The first major biography of the iconic actor Henry Fonda, a story of stardom, manhood, and the American character Henry Fonda's performances—in The Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Lady Eve, 12 Angry Men, On Golden Pond—helped define "American" in the twentieth century. He worked with movie masters from Ford and Sturges to Hitchcock and Leone. He was a Broadway legend. He fought in World War II and was loved the world over. Yet much of his life was rage and struggle. Why did Fonda marry five times—tempestuously to actress Margaret Sullavan, tragically to heiress Frances Brokaw, mother of Jane and Peter? Was he a man of integrity, worthy of the heroes he played, or the harsh father his children describe, the iceman who went onstage hours after his wife killed herself? Why did suicide shadow his life and art? What memories troubled him so? McKinney's Fonda is dark, complex, fascinating, and a product of glamour and acclaim, early losses and Midwestern demons—a man haunted by what he'd seen, and by who he was.
How popular films from Memento to Slumdog Millionaire can help us understand how memory works. In the movie Slumdog Millionaire, the childhood memories of a young game show contestant trigger his correct answers. In Memento, the amnesiac hero uses tattoos as memory aids. In Away from Her, an older woman suffering from dementia no longer remembers who her husband is. These are compelling films that tell affecting stories about the human condition. But what can these movies teach us about memory? In this book, John Seamon shows how examining the treatment of memory in popular movies can shed new light on how human memory works. After explaining that memory is actually a diverse collection of independent systems, Seamon uses examples from movies to offer an accessible, nontechnical description of what science knows about memory function and dysfunction. In a series of lively encounters with numerous popular films, he draws on Life of Pi and Avatar, for example, to explain working memory, used for short-term retention. He describes the process of long-term memory with examples from such films as Cast Away and Groundhog Day; The Return of Martin Guerre, among other movies, informs his account of how we recognize people; the effect of emotion on autobiographical memory is illustrated by The Kite Runner, Titanic, and other films; movies including Born on the Fourth of July and Rachel Getting Married illustrate the complex pain of traumatic memories. Seamon shows us that movies rarely get amnesia right, often using strategically timed blows to the protagonist's head as a way to turn memory off and then on again (as in Desperately Seeking Susan). Finally, he uses movies including On Golden Pond and Amour to describe the memory loss that often accompanies aging, while highlighting effective ways to maintain memory function.
This eBook is best viewed on a color device. This guide describes and illustrates, in full color, the plants and animals that live in or near ponds, lakes, streams, and wetlands. It includes surface-dwelling creatures as well as those of open water, the bottom, and the shore and tells how various animals and plants live together in a community. Plus suggestions for: Where and when to look Observing and collecting specimens Making exciting discoveries
Join an eccentric novelist on the run from his obsessive would-be biographer in this comic farce by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies. Why should I conceal the fact that I had found a full professor of Eng. Lit. rifling my dustbin? Fame, fortune, alcoholism, a failing marriage: for novelist Wilfred Barclay, his final unbearable irritation is his would-be-biographer, the young academic Professor Rick L. Tucker, who is determined to become The Barclay Man. Locked in a lethal relationship, the two men stumble across Europe, shedding wives, self-respect and identities in a game of literary cat and mouse - and the climax of their odyssey, when it comes, is as inevitable as it is unexpected . . . 'A complex literary comedy from an extraordinarily powerful writer, which holds us right through to the end.' Malcolm Bradbury 'Rich as a compost heap . . . It moves you and at times it can shake you.' Melvyn Bragg '[Golding's] splendid comic gift is used to often hilarious effect, running the whole gamut of comedy, from irony to farce . . . Hugely enjoyable.' Daily Telegraph