When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air

Author: Paul Kalanithi

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2016-01-12

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0812988418

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.


Buseyisms

Buseyisms

Author: Gary Busey

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1250161754

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Words of wisdom and incredible life stories, told through Gary Busey's unique Buseyisms. Take a wild ride through the life and mind of Gary Busey in his new hilarious, uplifting, tell-all memoir, Buseyisms. Gary transports you on a laugh-out–loud journey through the crazy twists and turns of his rise to fame, his descent into drug addiction, and his trip to the ‘other side’ after a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Gary also shares untold stories of his militant upbringing, surviving cancer in the middle of his face, and fun behind the scenes stories of his most popular movies and television roles including: A Star Is Born, The Buddy Holly Story, Lethal Weapon, Point Break, Under Siege, The Firm, Entourage, Celebrity Apprentice, and more. Included in this book are dozens of personal photographs from Gary’s early years up until now. Gary is a living testimony to the resilience of the human body and spirit. In his simply written but profound memoir, he shares his Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth to help others, who may be going through similar things, to realize that it is possible to survive challenging life events and come out a happy champion.


Dear Senthuran

Dear Senthuran

Author: Akwaeke Emezi

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 059332921X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

FEATURED ON THE COVER OF TIME MAGAZINE AS A 2021 NEXT GENERATION LEADER “A once-in-a-generation voice.” – Vulture “One of our greatest living writers.” – Shondaland A full-throated and provocative memoir in letters from the New York Times bestselling author, “a dazzling literary talent whose works cut to the quick of the spiritual self” (Esquire) In three critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, Igbo belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji reveals the harrowing yet resolute truths of their own life. Through candid, intimate correspondence with friends, lovers, and family, Emezi traces the unfolding of a self and the unforgettable journey of a creative spirit stepping into power in the human world. Their story weaves through transformative decisions about their gender and body, their precipitous path to success as a writer, and the turmoil of relationships on an emotional, romantic, and spiritual plane, culminating in a book that is as tender as it is brutal. Electrifying and inspiring, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes Emezi's fiction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of storytelling, self, and survival.


Spirit Boy

Spirit Boy

Author: Tricia Kelly

Publisher:

Published: 2008-09-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780981813400

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The LAW OF ATTRACTION for kids and teens: SPIRIT BOY, the lead character, still looks like the 11-year-old kid he was when he died. When he spots two boys heading down the same dead-end-road he traveled, he knows he must help them understand the LAW OF ATTRACTION, ' and how it works. Sam lives in South Central La with his sixteen-year-old brother and is bused everyday to a school in one of LA's wealthier neighborhoods. Henry lives there with his spoilt teenage sister. They look like they're the rich kids, who have this great life but they don't-Henry has a secret too.


Special Exits

Special Exits

Author: Joyce Farmer

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books

Published: 2014-08-03

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1606997602

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Joyce Farmer's memoir chronicles the decline of the author's parents' health, their relationship with one another and with their daughter, and how they cope with the day-to-day emotional fragility of the most taxing time of their lives. Joyce Farmer, best known for co-creating the Tits 'n Clits comics anthology in the 1970s, a feminist response to the rampant misogyny in underground comix, spent 11 years crafting Special Exits, a graphic memoir in the vein of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home or Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner, and Frank Stack's Our Cancer Year, about caring for her dying father and stepmother.


Sigh, Gone

Sigh, Gone

Author: Phuc Tran

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Published: 2020-04-21

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1250194725

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong, Sigh, Gone shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and assimilation woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature. In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents. Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Displaced and The Refugees, Sigh, Gone explores one man’s bewildering experiences of abuse, racism, and tragedy and reveals redemption and connection in books and punk rock. Against the hairspray-and-synthesizer backdrop of the ‘80s, he finds solace and kinship in the wisdom of classic literature, and in the subculture of punk rock, he finds affirmation and echoes of his disaffection. In his journey for self-discovery Tran ultimately finds refuge and inspiration in the art that shapes—and ultimately saves—him.


Catherine & Diderot

Catherine & Diderot

Author: Robert Zaretsky

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-02-18

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0674737903

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb. In October 1773, after a grueling trek from Paris, the aged and ailing Denis Diderot stumbled from a carriage in wintery St. Petersburg. The century’s most subversive thinker, Diderot arrived as the guest of its most ambitious and admired ruler, Empress Catherine of Russia. What followed was unprecedented: more than forty private meetings, stretching over nearly four months, between these two extraordinary figures. Diderot had come from Paris in order to guide—or so he thought—the woman who had become the continent’s last great hope for an enlightened ruler. But as it soon became clear, Catherine had a very different understanding not just of her role but of his as well. Philosophers, she claimed, had the luxury of writing on unfeeling paper. Rulers had the task of writing on human skin, sensitive to the slightest touch. Diderot and Catherine’s series of meetings, held in her private chambers at the Hermitage, captured the imagination of their contemporaries. While heads of state like Frederick of Prussia feared the consequences of these conversations, intellectuals like Voltaire hoped they would further the goals of the Enlightenment. In Catherine & Diderot, Robert Zaretsky traces the lives of these two remarkable figures, inviting us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.


Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws

Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws

Author: Charles de Montesquieu

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1989-09-21

Total Pages: 814

ISBN-13: 1107393116

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Spirit of the Laws is, without question, one of the central texts in the history of eighteenth-century thought, yet there has been no complete, scholarly English-language edition since that of Thomas Nugent, published in 1750. This lucid translation renders Montesquieu's problematic text newly accessible to a fresh generation of students, helping them to understand quite why Montesquieu was such an important figure in the early enlightenment and why The Spirit of the Laws was, for example, such an influence upon those who framed the American constitution. Fully annotated, this edition focuses attention upon Montesquieu's use of sources and his text as a whole, rather than upon those opening passages towards which critical energies have traditionally been devoted, and a select bibliography and chronology are provided for those coming to Montesquieu's work for the first time.