Widow of the waves is a juicy book about being the wife of a Great Lakes sailor for over three decades. Bev recalls the sailing life from the landlubber's perspective. She tells the stories about the captains, the management, the storms, the trials, the joys, the great galley cooks.
Will anyone ever know what happened to the Aloha, a sport fishing boat that vanished with all onboard in the Pacific off San Francisco’s coast? ‘Knowing’ is a complex, inexact business. There’s real truth and then there’s courtroom truth; a jury’s verdict may or may not approach what actually happened. Nor can someone reading about such an event—one that had no witnesses or hard evidence to explain it—be sure where the truth lies. But trials, judges, and juries are what we use in our legal system to find truth. The Widow Wave explores this alternate reality. It is a fascinating true-life mystery and lawyer procedural rolled into one. Jay Jacobs offers no facile answers—and he’s not the flawless protagonist typically starring in such dramas. He lets us see how such a big wrongful death case really unfolds, in a true story that reads like a novel. Will the jury find the truth? Will the reader? "An intelligently told true story of honor, integrity and justice. The Widow Wave reminded me of The Perfect Storm, played out in a taut courtroom thriller. Jay Jacobs masterfully weaves the harrowing tale of the last voyage of the Aloha, and courtroom battle that followed. A great read." — Robert Dugoni, New York Times Bestselling Author of My Sister's Grave "A compelling story of a modern day maritime tragedy that beautifully discusses the vital importance of advances in observational technologies, forecasts and communications in avoiding future loss of life at sea. Jacobs skillfully weaves together the legal, scientific and maritime narratives to enthrall and educate the reader." — Julie Thomas, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Manager of the Institute of Geo and Planetary Physics "Trial lawyer Jay Jacobs, in a unique, personally revealing memoir, defends a widow and her deceased husband's honor in an intimate first person account of how the civil trial process unfolds.... The reader will learn about the strategies, shoals, and embroilments of a real life, vigorously contested trial with its many emotional upheavals." — Justice James Marchiano (ret.), formerly Presiding Justice, California Court of Appeals, First Appellate District "Jacobs' vivid prose pulls you into a compelling drama, deftly transporting you from the courtroom to the storm-tossed Pacific and back to the courtroom again. The book reads like a well-wrought detective novel." — Daniel James Brown, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Boys in the Boat
A brave, intimate, beautifully crafted memoir by a survivor of the tsunami that struck the Sri Lankan coast in 2004 and took her entire family. On December 26, Boxing Day, Sonali Deraniyagala, her English husband, her parents, her two young sons, and a close friend were ending Christmas vacation at the seaside resort of Yala on the south coast of Sri Lanka when a wave suddenly overtook them. She was only to learn later that this was a tsunami that devastated coastlines through Southeast Asia. When the water began to encroach closer to their hotel, they began to run, but in an instant, water engulfed them, Sonali was separated from her family, and all was lost. Sonali Deraniyagala has written an extraordinarily honest, utterly engrossing account of the surreal tragedy of a devastating event that all at once ended her life as she knew it and her journey since in search of understanding and redemption. It is also a remarkable portrait of a young family's life and what came before, with all the small moments and larger dreams that suddenly and irrevocably ended.
Unlike anything Joyce Carol Oates has written before, A Widow’s Story is the universally acclaimed author’s poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of forty-six years, and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow’s Story is a literary memoir on a par with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice.
"Widow" is one title women do not want to have. Yet, according to the Surgeon General’s office, 800,000 people become widows or widowers every year in the United States alone. Every aspect of a widow’s existence changes—like it or not, ready or not. These changes add to the emotional roller coaster that most women experience after losing their husband. Miriam Neff understands the ride. As she struggled to understand and accept her new role after her husband’s death, she recognized the need for women to hear from others about their experiences and what helped them transition to this new stage of life. From One Widow to Another offers practical advice for those facing the loss of a spouse. Drawing from her own loss, Neff walks with the reader through practical issues to a sense of encouragement.
When wealthy Jacqueline Abington plans to elope, she enlists Tessa Bowen to take her place on the Titanic's maiden voyage. For the first time Tessa is living a life of luxury, but struggles with the ruse when she falls for a rich American who has taken an interest in her. Then tragedy strikes.
A timeless story of first love set in a remote fishing village in Japan. • "A story that is both happy and a work of art.... Altogether a joyous and lovely thing." —The New York Times A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers.
First published on the eve of the First World War, Keyserling's masterpiece offers a vivid portrait of a society on the verge of dissolution. A group of German aristocrats gathers at a seaside village on the Baltic Sea for a summer holiday in the early years of the twentieth century. The characters represent a cross-section of the upper classes of imperial Germany: a philandering baron, his jealous wife, a gallant cavalry officer, the elderly widow of a general, a cynical government official, a lady’s companion. Their lives, even on holiday, are regulated by rigid protocol and archaic codes of honour. But their quiet, disciplined world is thrown into disarray by the unexpected presence of Doralice, a young countess who has rebelled against social constraints by escaping from an arranged marriage and running away with a bourgeois artist. Gary Miller's new translation will find a new generation of readers for this neglected German classic. “Keyserling...understands how to describe a summer afternoon so that as the bright sunshine turns to twilight one has the sensation of a whole lifetime.” Hermann Hesse “For him, art consisted of questioning, kindness, self-discipline, music and dreams. He was never a leader, but he will always be loved.” Thomas Mann
“A frank, poignant memoir about an unlikely marriage, a tragic death in Iraq, and the soul-testing work of picking up the pieces” (People) in the tradition of such powerful bestsellers as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Carole Radziwill’s What Remains. Artis Henderson was a free-spirited young woman with dreams of traveling the world and one day becoming a writer. Marrying a conservative Texan soldier and becoming an Army wife was never part of her plan, but when she met Miles, Artis threw caution to the wind and moved with him to a series of Army bases in dusty Southern towns, far from the exotic future of her dreams. If this was true love, she was ready to embrace it. But when Miles was training and Artis was left alone, she experienced feelings of isolation and anxiety. It did not take long for a wife’s worst fears to come true. On November 6, 2006, the Apache helicopter carrying Miles crashed in Iraq, leaving twenty-six-year-old Artis—in official military terms—an “unremarried widow.” In this memoir Artis recounts not only the unlikely love story she shared with Miles and her unfathomable recovery in the wake of his death—from the dark hours following the military notification to the first fumbling attempts at new love—but also reveals how Miles’s death mirrored her own father’s, in a plane crash that Artis survived when she was five years old and that left her own mother a young widow. Unremarried Widow is “a powerful look at mourning as a military wife….You can finish it in a day and find yourself haunted weeks later” (The New York Times Book Review).
Celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda in the summer 2005. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body surfing. Francisco, blamed for Aura's death by her family and blaming himself, wanted to die, too. But instead he wrote Say Her Name, a novel chronicling his great love and unspeakable loss, tracking the stages of grief when pure love gives way to bottomless pain. Suddenly a widower, Goldman collects everything he can about his wife, hungry to keep Aura alive with every memory. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through their newlywed years in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe-and always through the prism of her gifted writings-Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss. Humor leavens the pain as he lives through the madness of utter grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous and playful as it is deep and profound. Say Her Name is a love story, a bold inquiry into destiny and accountability, and a tribute to Aura-who she was and who she would have been.