Reckoning

Reckoning

Author: Magda Szubanski

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 2015-09-23

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1922253227

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Winner, Book of the Year and Biography of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards, 2016 Heartbreaking, joyous, traumatic, intimate and revelatory, Reckoning is the book where Magda Szubanski, one of Australia's most beloved performers, tells her story. In this extraordinary memoir, Magda describes her journey of self-discovery from a suburban childhood, haunted by the demons of her father's espionage activities in wartime Poland and by her secret awareness of her sexuality, to the complex dramas of adulthood and her need to find out the truth about herself and her family. With courage and compassion she addresses her own frailties and fears, and asks the big questions about life, about the shadows we inherit and the gifts we pass on. Honest, poignant, utterly captivating, Reckoning announces the arrival of a fearless writer and natural storyteller. It will touch the lives of its readers. Magda Szubanski is one of Australia’s best known and most loved performers. She began her career in university revues, then appeared in a number of sketch comedy shows before creating the iconic character of Sharon Strzelecki in ABC-TV’s Kath and Kim. She has also acted in films (Babe, Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet, The Golden Compass) and stage shows. Reckoning is her first book. ‘A brave and tender book about everything that matters most in life.’ Cate Blanchett ‘This is a remarkable memoir, that weaves the tragedy of twentieth century history into a personal narrative of coming to terms with family and self, and manages to honour both stories. The writing is assured and controlled, the storytelling expert and thoughtful, the language eloquent and moving. The writing, the story, the voice—all of it is beautiful.’ Christos Tsiolkas ‘A memoir that will dazzle every kind of reader...Reckoning is a riveting, overwhelmingly poignant autobiography by a woman of genius. It is a book about how someone might live with the idea of killing the thing they love. It is a story of love and death and redemption and a daughter’s love for her father. It is an extraordinary hymn to the tragic heroism at the heart of ordinary life and the soaring moral scrutiny of womankind. Every library should have it, every school should teach it.’ Weekend Australian ‘Unlike most autobiographies by famous people, Reckoning has substance beyond the writer’s fame...Szubanski’s fine memoir, written with great style, adds another layer to our history.’ Crikey ‘This is documentary writing of the highest order and Szubanski has given life to an incredible war story...This tale of war and suburbia, sexuality and comedy, is likely to be the most popular Australian book of the year.’ Age/Sydney Morning Herald ‘This is an inspiring memoir of a woman who faced her demons, sought treatment for depression and overcame disappointments.’ Good Reading ‘A page-turner...[Szubanski] is articulate and likeable as she tries to reconcile herself with the many difficult aspects of her past.’ New Zealand Herald 'Reckoning is a beautiful and moving story of a serious, thoughtful and complex person.' Paul Barclay, ABC Radio National Books and Arts, Best Books 2015 ‘Magda Szubanski’s brave, compassionate—and hilarious—Reckoning may be some sort of masterpiece of the form.’ Australian, Best Books 2015 ‘A deeply personal read—sometimes uncomfortable so—but Magda is an honest, forthright guide, and her love for her parents (and her siblings, especially older sister Barbara) shine through. This is not a sentimental read, nor is it a self-pitying one, but it’s a warm, intelligent, brave and occasionally eye-opening one. I found it utterly captivating and came away from it feeling as if Magda had somehow exonerated the ghosts of her family’s past—or at least come to terms with them.’ Reading Matters ‘This was an interesting read that I would highly recommend to both those who have heard of Magda and for those who haven’t. I am definitely going to be checking out more of her work. 4/5’ Debra’s Book Cafe ‘Hard hitting and superbly told...If there’s one memoir you should read this year regardless of whether or not you know the author, it’s this one.’ Worm Hole ‘This memoir uncovers long-held secrets with disarming candour. Not a celebrity exposé as much as a family history, Reckoning is moving and compassionate. That Szubanski can act is a given fact; that she can also write is revelatory.’ Best Books of 2016, Sydney Morning Herald ‘Magda Szubanski’s memoir, Reckoning, appealed to the genre-loving reader in me. It felt as if I was watching hundreds of movies; wartime espionage, the migrant’s journey, the coming-of-age school saga, the uni student’s journey at the height of 1970s feminism, and more. It was epic, but so uniquely Australian and despite our different upbringings, it felt personal. As if it was written specifically for that younger me who took forever to feel comfortable in her own skin, so she could take on the world.’ Melina Marchetta, Best Books of 2016, Guardian ‘Magda Szubanski lays bare her remarkable family history in the beautifully written, powerful and at time harrowing Reckoning...One of the finest memoirs of the year, through all of the dark places, Reckoning never loses sight of her remarkable wit.’ SBS ‘Honest, poignant, utterly captivating, Reckoning announces the arrival of a fearless writer and natural storyteller. It will touch the lives of its readers.’ Starts at 60 p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none}


Love and Trouble

Love and Trouble

Author: Claire Dederer

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-05-09

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1101946512

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Blazingly intelligent, wickedly funny, and piercingly honest, a memoir that captures the perils and pleasures of girlhood, womanhood, and life itself. “One of my favorite books of the last few years.” —Cheryl Strayed “Sentence for sentence, a more pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think of.” —The Atlantic At mid-life, Claire Dederer developed a sudden yearning for jailbreak. In this exuberant memoir, she reflects on two periods in her life uncannily similar in their emotional intensity: her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of unruly and mysterious new hungers, and her recollections of herself as a teenager.


A Mother's Reckoning

A Mother's Reckoning

Author: Sue Klebold

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1101902752

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"The mother of one of the two shooters at Columbine High School draws on personal recollections, journal entries and video recordings to piece together what led to her son's unpredicted breakdown and share insights into how other families might recognize warning signs,"--NoveList.


The Ogallala Road

The Ogallala Road

Author: Julene Bair

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0143127071

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A memoir of love and reckoning. A story of love, family, and the fight to keep the great plains from running dry. Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment, 'Hang on to your land!' But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family--like other irrigators--pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family's role in its depletion haunts her. As traditional ways of life collide with industrial realities, Bair must dramatically change course.


This Close to Happy

This Close to Happy

Author: Daphne Merkin

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0374711917

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“A cleareyed, insightful account of how she felt during her nosedives into despair . . . shot through with a self-awareness that helps readers cheer her on.”—The New York Times A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of the Year “Despair is always described as dull,” writes Daphne Merkin, “when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.” This Close to Happy—Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression—captures this strange light. Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin portrays the lifelong arc of her affliction, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where she lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not “cured.” The opposite of depression, she writes with characteristic insight, is not a state of unimaginable happiness, but a state of relative all-right-ness. In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that is still often stigmatized and shrouded in misunderstanding. “[A] mesmerizing memoir.” —Booklist (starred review) “Brings a stunningly perceptive voice to the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.” —Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice


Mill Town

Mill Town

Author: Kerri Arsenault

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1250155959

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Winner of the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award Winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics John Leonard Prize for Best First Book Finalist for the 2021 New England Society Book Award Finalist for the 2021 New England Independent Booksellers Association Award A New York Times Editors’ Choice and Chicago Tribune top book for 2020 “Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling, quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with America’s sins.” —Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland Kerri Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed to its demise. Mill Town is a book of narrative nonfiction, investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with the central question; Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?


Women's Work

Women's Work

Author: Megan K. Stack

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0525431950

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 From National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack, a stunning memoir of raising her children abroad with the help of Chinese and Indian women who are also working mothers When Megan Stack was living in Beijing, she left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have her first child and work from home writing a book. She quickly realized that caring for a baby and keeping up with the housework while her husband went to the office each day was consuming the time she needed to write. This dilemma was resolved in the manner of many upper-class families and large corporations: she availed herself of cheap Chinese labor. The housekeeper Stack hired was a migrant from the countryside, a mother who had left her daughter in a precarious situation to earn desperately needed cash in the capital. As Stack's family grew and her husband's job took them to Dehli, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home. Stack grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives: domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies. Hiring poor women had given her the ability to work while raising her children, but what ethical compromise had she made? Determined to confront the truth, Stack traveled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the tradeoffs they'd been forced to make as working mothers seeking upward mobility—and on the cost to the children who were left behind. Women's Work is an unforgettable story of four women as well as an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.


Bonkers

Bonkers

Author: Jennifer Saunders

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2013-10-10

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0241967279

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Bonkers: My Life in Laughs by Jennifer Saunders - the hilarious, touching life story of the iconic comedian and national treasure Jennifer Saunders' comic creations have brought joy to millions. From Comic Strip to Comic Relief, from Bolly-swilling Edina in Ab Fab to her takes on Madonna or Mamma Mia, her characters are household names. But it's Jennifer herself who has a place in all our hearts. This is her funny, moving and frankly bonkers memoir, filled with laughter, friends and occasional heartache - but never misery. BONKERS is full of riotous adventures: accidentally enrolling on a teacher training course with a young Dawn French, bluffing her way to each BBC series, shooting Lulu, trading wild faxes with Joanna Lumley, touring India with Ruby Wax and Goldie Hawn. There's cancer, too, when she becomes 'Brave Jen'. But her biggest battle is with the bane of her life: the Laws of Procrastination. As she admits, 'There has never been a Plan. Everything has been fairly random, happened by accident or just fallen into place. I'm off now, to do some sweeping...' Prepare to chuckle, whoop, and go BONKERS.


Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning

Author: Carys Cragg

Publisher: arsenal pulp press

Published: 2017-11-20

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1551526980

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A powerful and emotional memoir about a woman whose father was brutally murdered at home by an intruder. Twenty years later, she decides to contact his murderer in prison, and learns startling new information about the crime. Dead Reckoning follows the author’s determination to confront the man who destroyed her world in order to find peace. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.


Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

Author: Alex Halberstadt

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1400067065

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Can trauma be inherited? In this luminous memoir of identity, exile, ancestry, and reckoning, an American writer returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him. It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that had endured for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather--most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin--to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness, and a yearning for home. He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.