I've done my best in what follows to put my life dowb with accuracy and without exaggeration, as memory and research have prompted. Yes, Mr. Orwell, even the disgraceful bits-some of them. But as Mr. Dickey notes, memory is notoriously self-serving. Ig you find yourself in these pages and don't like what I have remembered about you, I apologize. I was after the truth of my own life and everything else was subject to that.
Opposable Thumbs is Dean Haspiel's stories of a born & bred New Yorker and the trials and tribulations of living in the big bad city which serves as the backdrop for the informed, existential expression in his sociological comics. Even the bleakest and grubbiest settings are lovingly, lusciously rendered by Haspiel's sharp brush.
If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following best practice can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you'll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions including: What are the causal relationships at work here? and What are the implied trade-offs? Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.
Praise for OPPOSABLE LIVES, Volume One of an Autobiography "I found it fascinating. . . . There are very few people who could write an interesting and entertaining autobiography." Mary Arntfield "A wonderful read!. . . tender and insightful, straight-forward and honest." Bill Guest "What a wonderful gift!. . . it's extremely well written, flows lucidly an easy while highly perceptive read." John Davis "I love your witty title. Opposable thumbs led to curiosity, experimentation, imagining, growth in intellect. Opposable Lives' generates these, and much, much more." Thomas Whitbread "I thoroughly enjoyed it." Brian Carnahan
Poetry. This is Joe Elliot's second collection of pitch-perfect poems. "OPPOSABLE THUMB is essential reading. In these poems, Joe Elliot brings a whopping arsenal of technique to the table to create a sumptuous feast of meaning without equal signs or slashes...Here, song is thought. It all rings true. Essential the way mindfulness is essential. Enjoy the view" -Mitch Highfill. "How has the world limped along for so long without Joe Elliot's new book? If you want to relearn language, please read these poems, which release the kinetic potential of the page like toasters dropped into bathtubs" -Marcella Durand. "Opposable Thumb is a welcome reminder that, in the social world, we are living with the animals. Joe's poems form a kind of sectarian hymnal, a nondenominational performance score for singing the Veda of everyday life--not so much laments as songs of quiet observation and acceptance--a kind of optimistic manual for the care and feeding of each other, nits and all. An Olsonian wet roo
FIGHT FIRE WITH FUR.Can psychotic, cyborg cats, a pyromaniac alien, the punk rock alchemist, a spaghetti-strapped, pistol-strapped merc, and a severed head convince the oblivious Dr. Vanderbilt that he and his cats hold the key to thwarting the imminent alien invasion?EARTH'S FATE COULDN'T REST IN WORSE HANDS.The Arca Trochia; an entity two billion light years from Earth implanted ideas, Sparks, in Dr. Vanderbilt's mind. Sent from a planet called Halteres, the Sparks search the cosmos for habitable planets and germinate in fertile minds. Once they root, the Sparks create portals allowing for instantaneous travel between the two worlds. They call these discovery channels, Spires.The first Spark told Dr. Vanderbilt to document every detail of Halteres. The second Spark told him to attach bionic, opposable thumbs onto his cats. Thumb ideas should not be meddled with.PAY ATTENTION. THIS IS SERIOUS.It'll take every gram of effort (and drugs) the multi-species, trans-galactic cadre of misfits can find to knock some sense into Dr. V as they cut a swath of debauchery through the Rocky Mountains and Southwest on their way to head off the attack.ALIENS, PREPARE TO ABDUCT SOME LEAD.
WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE WORK, volume three of an autobiography by Peter Carnahan, covers the 18-plus years the author worked as Director of the Theatre and Literature Programs of The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. This time, from 1972 to 1991, was a period of enormous growth for the arts in Pennsylvania and the nation. Reflecting that growth, the PCA budget grew from $286,000 to $12 million during the period. During the second decade covered by this volume, Carnahan began his next career, as a writer, publishing his first nonfiction book in 1989.
The first full-scale biography of prolific writer Alice Adams, whose celebrated stories and bestselling novels traced women’s lives and illuminated “an era characterized both by drastic cultural changes and by the persistence of old expectations, conventions, and biases” (The New Yorker). “Nobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams,” a New York Times critic said of the prolific writer. Born in 1926, Alice Adams grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, during the Great Depression and came of age during World War II. After college at Radcliffe and a year in Paris, she moved to San Francisco. Always a rebel in good-girl’s clothing, Adams used her education, sexual and emotional curiosity, and uncompromising artistic ambition to break the strictures that bound women in midcentury America. Divorced with a child to raise, she worked at secretarial jobs for two decades before she could earn a living as a writer. One of only four winners of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, Adams wove her life into her fiction and used her writing to understand the changing tides of the 20th century. Her work portrays vibrant characters both young and old who live on the edge of their emotions, absorbed by love affairs yet always determined to be independent and to fulfill their personal destinies. Carol Sklenicka interweaves Adams’s deeply felt, elegantly fierce life with a cascade of events—the civil rights and women’s rights movements, the sixties counterculture, and sexual freedom. Her biography’s revealing analyses of Adams’s stories and novels from Careless Love to Superior Women to The Last Lovely City, and her extensive interviews with Adams’s family and friends, among them Mary Gaitskill, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, and Alison Lurie, give us the definitive story of a writer often dubbed “America’s Colette.” Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer captures not just a beloved woman’s life in full, but a crucial span of American history.
Begun as an audacious experiment, for thirty years the Hedgerow Theatre prospered as America's most successful repertory company. While known for its famous alumnae (Ann Harding and Richard Basehart), Hedgerow's legacy is a living library of over 200 productions created by Jasper Deeter's idealistic and determined pursuit of 'truth and beauty.'
Praise for OPPOSABLE LIVES, Volume One of an Autobiography "I found it fascinating. . . . There are very few people who could write an interesting and entertaining autobiography." Mary Arntfield "A wonderful read!. . . tender and insightful, straight-forward and honest." Bill Guest "What a wonderful gift!. . . it's extremely well written, flows lucidly an easy while highly perceptive read." John Davis "I love your witty title. Opposable thumbs led to curiosity, experimentation, imagining, growth in intellect. Opposable Lives' generates these, and much, much more." Thomas Whitbread "I thoroughly enjoyed it." Brian Carnahan
