Come back with me to the ancestors of Robert Shirk. The people and places are true, but put in a story form. The book starts out in 1912 with 12-year old Robert Shirk finding an old picture album in the attic and he wants to know more about his ancestors. His mother starts by reading a book published by a cousin on the very early relatives, going back to the Vikings. The reader will go back to 1642, over 380 years ago, when the first ancestor, John Poling, a puritan, comes from England to the present age. This book captures true American History of the average man the way it was for so many families of the time period.
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new book on decoding the behavior of the people around you Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves. We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.
Robert Wyatt started out as the drummer and singer for Soft Machine, who shared a residency at Middle Earth with Pink Floyd and toured America with the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He brought a jazz mindset to the 1960’s rock scene, having honed his drumming skills in a shed at the end of Robert Graves’ garden in Mallorica, Spain. Wyatt's life took an abrupt turn in 1973, when he fell from a fourth-floor window at a party and was paralyzed from the waist down. He reinvented himself as a singer and composer with the extraordinary album Rock Bottom, which he followed with an idiosyncratic string of records that uniquely combine the personal and political. Along the way, Robert has worked with the likes of Brian Eno, Bjork, Jerry Dammers, Charlie Haden, David Gilmour, Paul Weller and Hot Chip. Marcus O’Dair has talked to all of them—indeed anyone who has shaped, or been shaped by Wyatt over five decades. Different Every Time is the first biography of Robert Wyatt, and it was written with his full participation. It includes illustrations by Alfreda Benge and photographs from Robert’s personal archive.
The bastard step-child of Milton Friedman and Anthony Bourdain, Socialism Sucks is a bar-crawl through former, current, and wannabe socialist countries around the world. Free market economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Sweden to investigate the dangers and idiocies of socialism—while drinking a lot of beer.
Robert, a 30-something independent filmmaker in Los Angeles, is hearing voices in his head. Alice Hershlug, a Jewish movie star who recently won the Academy Award, is slowly torturing him via The Grapevine, a kind of mental telephone.Hoovey Weinerschniztel, a movie producer in New York City, is in love with his plastic telephone and blas� about his recent rape and imprisonment in his office closet of one of his former employees.The novel appears to be an Anti-Semitic rant, written by a lonely Jew who has apparently been accused of being a child molester. It cuts rapidly back and forth between the narrator's vitriolic prose poems which accuse American Jews and other plutocrats of ruining the country, the trials and tribulations of Robert as he navigates Hollywood and the mental health system, and the machinations of several Hollywood insiders as they stab each other in the back to rise to the top.The island of Manhattan turns into a sailing ship and blasts through the strait of Gibraltar on the way to visit Jerusalem, a psychiatric treatment facility gets possessed by some kind of evil demon named Cheeto, and Hoovey Weinerschnitzel abandons his religion to found an evil cult.Part political diatribe, part philosophical essay, part picaresque, the novel explores the implications of the new post-2008 U.S. economy on the human psyche, relations between Jew and Gentile, between American and Israeli Jews, between thought and reality, and tries to figure out where the hell America can go next.
'A wild, sleazy, drug-filled odyssey ... Doyle's maverick novel deserves the accolades coming its way' Independent 'The best work to date from a writer who gets better and better with each release' Irish Indepdendent 'A masterclass in what not to do' New Statesman 'His best book so far: riddling, irreverent, fearless' TLS Rob has spent most of his confusing adult life wandering, writing, and imbibing literature and narcotics in equally vast doses. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, between exaltation and despair, his travels have acquired a de facto purpose: the immemorial quest for transcendent meaning. On a lurid pilgrimage for cheap thrills and universal truth, Doyle's narrator takes us from the menacing peripheries of Paris to the drug-fuelled clubland of Berlin, from art festivals to sun-kissed islands, through metaphysical awakenings in Asia and the brink of destruction in Europe, into the shattering revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT. A dazzling, intimate, and profound celebration of art and ageing, sex and desire, the limits of thought and the extremes of sensation, Threshold confirms Doyle as one of the most original writers in contemporary literature.
