Career & Money

As a teenager, Markus Torgeby turned out to be a very talented long-distance runner. It didn't take long before he was discovered by an enthusiastic coach who set very high goals. However, while Markus performed brilliantly in training, during competitions he often failed inexplicably. The pressure of competition alongside the strain of caring for his MS-suffering mother took its toll, and when an injury put an end to Markus's running career, he lost his foothold in life. At just 20 years old, Markus moved to one of the most isolated and cold regions of northern Sweden. There he lived as a recluse for four years staying in a tent and braving the harsh Scandinavian winters. And he ran. His time alone would prove to be more than an escape and was in fact a search for a direction in life. The Runner is a unique and powerful book: a portrait of an extraordinary man as well as a fascinating exploration of running and personal wellbeing.

Miserable at an elegant day school for girls, Victoria Coren finds an escape in the mysterious world of poker. Twenty years later, she has won a million dollars and forgotten to have children. What price adventure? This is a true story of happiness and heartbreak, smoke and mirrors, bright lights and shady characters. It is a memoir of friendship and belonging, love and loss. It might also teach you how to win a million . . .

In 1754 the British adventurer, compiler, and novelist Edward Kimber published The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson. Rooted in a tale Kimber heard while exploring the Atlantic seaboard, Mr. Anderson is the novelist’s transatlantic tale of slavery, Indian relations, and frontier life. Having been kidnapped in England, transported across the Middle Passage, and sold to a brutal Maryland planter as a white slave, Tom Anderson gains his freedom and in rapid succession becomes a successful trader, a war hero, and a friend to slave, Indian, Quebecois, and Englishman alike. Still engaging 250 years after its original publication, Mr. Anderson offers a rich and varied portrayal of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic world. This Broadview edition features an introduction by both a literary scholar and a historian, elaborating on significant themes in the novel. The appendices include an extensive selection of documents―some unpublished elsewhere―further contextualizing many of those themes, including slavery, British representations of colonial America, and eighteenth-century British literature’s emphasis on sensibility and the “cult of feeling.”

Sybil Fix grew up amid the exquisite landscape of Italy, where her family moved so her father could become a violin maker. Cetona--her Tuscan "gingerbread town in the hills," as she calls it--is populated by kind-hearted, genuine, and cantankerous folks whose lives are rooted in farming, artisanship, and the routine of an ancient and familiar place. Among them, Sybil becomes a young woman, falls in love, and experiences true home. At twenty, inspired by her American parents, she comes to the United States for college and stays on to build a career and a life. Leaving Cetona behind, however, turns out to be an uprooting event. Home continues to inhabit her, always calling her back. Pulled between places and loyalties, she cannot stay put, and finally she returns to Cetona for a year during which she struggles to find out whether she belongs. This intimate memoir of a life both blessed and torn captures the longing and rootlessness that follow the experience of growing up between cultures. It resonates with mesmerizing beauty and joy of rediscovery, as well as the grief of leaving things behind only to search for them again. The Girl from Borgo is a tender ode to a place and a people. Above all, it's a story of love.

I entered the world kicking and screaming in 1973. I put my theatrical entrance down to me craving a nicotine fix. Mom smoked, like a chimney, right through the nine months of pregnancy. As far as anyone knew back then, smoking was good for the unborn child. I'm pretty sure smoking was even permitted in the Plunket rooms mom and I used to go to before I was born. How I survived to tell the tale of my young years is a miracle—we had no seatbelts, no bike helmets, no sun screen, we had trampolines with exposed springs, playgrounds with concrete floors, we shared bath water, the dentist was known as the murder house, and we had to endure summers with lawn prickles as ferocious as land-mines. Back then service stations gave you service and petrol. I never saw mom get out of the car at a forecourt, she'd just wind the window down and hold the money out. If she tried that now she could be parked up at the pumps long enough for her family to file a missing persons report. This is the story of my childhood. But it is probably the story of yours as well if you grew up in the 1980s. This is a book for any New Zealander who has ever been told to stop crying or you will be given something to really cry about.

"Big Happiness is extremely important to our community. Mark Panek’s biography of Percy Kipapa speaks to the consequences of the destruction of Hawai‘i’s rural neighborhoods, unchecked development, the ice epidemic, the failures of government, sumo, intricate family and neighbor relationships, and more. What is most impressive is Panek’s ability to weave all of these complex topics together in a seamless narrative that connects all the dots. Part mystery, part investigative journalism, part poignant Island portrait, this work contains an emotional element that binds the reader to the subjects in a dignified yet touching way, showing compassion and even affection for people while revealing their flaws and shortcomings. This book will resonate with an Island audience and with anyone interested in Hawai‘i." ―Victoria Kneubuhl, Hawai‘i writer and playwright "This book tells of personal triumphs and failures, and also the triumphs and failures of families, communities, organizations, agencies, governments, and churches dealing with the multiple consequences of ‘progress’ in contemporary Hawai‘i. There have been heroes and villains at all levels―frequently, the same individuals and agencies are both at the same time. The story of Percy Kipapa is especially poignant because professional sumo gave him a unique opportunity to transcend Hawai‘i’s culture of colonialism, racism, poverty, and drug addiction, which in the end all brought him down anyway. Mark Panek has done a masterful job of weaving these strands together."―Reverend Bob Nakata, former Hawai‘i state senator "Spanning the history of Waikane and the brutality of Japan’s national sport, Big Happiness is a remarkably ambitious piece that links one man’s murder to the ice epidemic, land development, and political corruption in Hawai‘i. Mark Panek’s meticulously researched, skillfully written, heartbreaking story, filled with voices that ring true, is an indictment of an entire system that crushed a gentle giant. While other Hawai‘i writers dwell in ‘take me back to da kine’ nostalgia, Panek tells it like it really is." ―Chris McKinney, author of The Tattoo and Mililani Mauka

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author. Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work? Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy―for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime. 8 pages of color illustration

After a decade of trying to become a mother – eleven rounds of unsuccessful IVF, multiple miscarriages and a pregnancy which proved almost fatal – Jessica Hepburn knew it was time to do something different. So she decided to swim the twenty-one miles across the English Channel – no easy feat, especially for someone with an aversion to exercise who couldn't swim very well. As the punishing training commenced, Jessica learned you need to put on weight to stave off the cold. This then led to another idea: what if she wrote to a collection of inspiring women, asking if they would meet and eat with her to answer the question: does motherhood make you happy? The response was overwhelming. From baronesses and professors to award-winners and record-breakers, amazing women from different walks of life – some mothers, some not – all with compelling truths to tell about female fulfilment and the meaning of motherhood. On 2 September 2015, Jessica set out from Dover beach in the dark, taking the words that each of the women had given to sea in her bid to answer the question.

Katey Dickens was born into a house of turbulent celebrity and grew up surrounded by fascinating, famous, and infamous people. From a very young age, she knew her vocation was to be an artist. Lucinda Hawksley charts the life of a celebrated portrait painter, who redefines our preconceptions about Victorian women. Living to be almost ninety, Katey survived an unconventional marriage, love affairs, heartbreak, depression, and the challenges of being a female artist in a male-dominated era. Compelling and illuminating, Katey tells the story of a spirited woman who found fame at the centre of the first celebrity phenomenon; it also uncovers the reality of what it was like to be a child of Charles and Catherine Dickens. This biography of Katey, celebrating her artistic prestige – which saw her compared to Millais – is long overdue. The details of her fascinating life await rediscovery.

Jim Baxter was one of Scotland's greatest-ever football players, a left-footed wonder who became a Rangers icon and a leading member of the celebrated Scotland side of the 1960s. In this insightful biography, Tom Miller takes an in-depth look at the legend known as Slim Jim. Baxter joined Rangers in 1960 for a then record transfer fee of GBP 17,500 and quickly showed his worth, helping them to an incredible run of ten trophy victories between 1960 and 1965. He also played an instrumental role in Scotland's strong international run, especially playing against England, where in 1963 he scored both goals in a 2-1 victory after Scotland were reduced to ten players. And his 1967 game of keepieuppie, while waiting for teammates to get into position, in the midst of the British Home Championship has gone down in football history. Yet off the field, Baxter was a contradictory character. Though an affable man who eschewed the sectarianism that blighted Glasgow football, he was also a gambler and regularly drank to excess. After stints at Sunderland and Nottingham Forest, his football career ended with a brief spell at Rangers again. Baxter died of pancreatic cancer in 2001. In this insightful biography, lifelong fan Tom Miller brings Slim Jim and his passion for Rangers to life, capturing the halcyon days of 1960s football and charting the rise and fall of arguably the greatest footballer Scotland has ever produced.

A balanced look at one of the most controversial commanders of World War I, using interviews with his son and new archival material to shed light onto an intensely private man Posterity has not been kind to Douglas Haig, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front for much of World War I. Haig has frequently been presented as a commander who sent his troops to slaughter in vast numbers at the Somme in 1916 and at Passchendaele the following year. This account reexamines Haig's record in these battles and presents his predicament with a fresh eye. More importantly, it reevaluates Haig himself, exploring the nature of the man, turning to both his early life and army career before 1914, as well as his unstinting work on behalf of ex-servicemen's organizations after 1918. Finally, in this definitive biography, the man emerges from the myth.

A poignant memoir of the Paris literary scene in the 1950s and 1960s by one of its protagonists Some of last century's leading cultural figures are brought to life here, people who shaped our modern thinking and defined the tastes of an entire generation, changing forever the way we look at literature and the world around us. Drawing from the accounts of two fellow publishers—Maurice Girodias and Barney Rosset, who were also active in the heady days of 1950s and 1960s Paris, London, and New York—and from his own personal recollections, John Calder talks about the challenges of being a publisher in that era of censorship and political persecution and the problems faced by such writers as Beckett, Burroughs, Trocchi, and Miller to have their work accepted and recognized. Told in John Calder's trademark raconteur style and peppered with salacious, revealing, and entertaining anecdotes, this book will appeal both to the general reader and anyone who is interested in the social and cultural history of the 20th century.

2015 IPPY Gold Medal in Biography Gold Medal in Biography, Foreword Reviews' 2014 IndieFab Book of the Year Awards 2015 Michigan Notable Book Finalist, 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko, known as Jadzia (Yah′-jah), was a young Polish Catholic physician in Lódz at the start of World War II. Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two-day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through her wartime experiences, to her struggles to create a new life in the postwar world. For more information, see rylkobauer.com Jadzia's daughter, anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer, constructs an intimate ethnography that weaves a personal family narrative against a twentieth-century historical backdrop. As Rylko-Bauer travels back in time with her mother, we learn of the particular hardships that female concentration camp prisoners faced. The struggle continued after the war as Jadzia attempted to rebuild her life, first as a refugee doctor in Germany and later as an immigrant to the United States. Like many postwar immigrants, Jadzia had high hopes of making new connections and continuing her career. Unable to surmount personal, economic, and social obstacles to medical licensure, however, she had to settle for work as a nurse's aide. As a contribution to accounts of wartime experiences, Jadzia's story stands out for its sensitivity to the complexities of the Polish memory of war. Built upon both historical research and conversations between mother and daughter, the story combines Jadzia's voice and Rylko-Bauer's own journey of rediscovering her family's past. The result is a powerful narrative about struggle, survival, displacement, and memory, augmenting our understanding of a horrific period in human history and the struggle of Polish immigrants in its aftermath.

In this dazzling work of history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career "In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins an enthralling narrative account of how Benjamin Franklin--seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French--convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America's experiment in democracy. When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he well understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues; engineered the Franco-American alliance of 1778; and helped to negotiate the peace of 1783. The eight-year French mission stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing of the man. In A Great Improvisation, Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin's life. Here is an unfamiliar, unforgettable chapter of the Revolution, a rousing tale of American infighting, and the treacherous backroom dealings at Versailles that would propel George Washington from near decimation at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown. From these pages emerges a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country's bid for independence.

In 1936, long before the discovery of the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, the Royal Ontario Museum made a sensational acquisition: the contents of a Viking grave that prospector Eddy Dodd said he had found on his mining claim east of Lake Nipigon. The relics remained on display for two decades, challenging understandings of when and where Europeans first reached the Americas. In 1956 the discovery was exposed as an unquestionable hoax, tarnishing the reputation of the museum director, Charles Trick Currelly, who had acquired the relics and insisted on their authenticity. Drawing on an array of archival sources, Douglas Hunter reconstructs the notorious hoax and its many players. Beardmore unfolds like a detective story as the author sifts through the voluminous evidence and follows the efforts of two unlikely debunkers, high-school teacher Teddy Elliott and government geologist T.L. Tanton, who find themselves up against Currelly and his scholarly allies. Along the way, the controversy draws in a who’s who of international figures in archaeology, Scandinavian studies, and the museum world, including anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, whose mid-1950s crusade against the find’s authenticity finally convinced scholars and curators that the grave was a fraud. Shedding light on museum practices and the state of the historical and archaeological professions in the mid-twentieth century, Beardmore offers an unparalleled view inside a major museum scandal to show how power can be exercised across professional networks and hamper efforts to arrive at the truth.

By chance, Greg Sheridan's early life saw him become intimate friends and colleagues with a fascinating list of people who now make up Australia's political leadership. At university Tony Abbott was his best friend; he became close to Peter Costello as well as Labor figures Michael Danby and Michael Easson. As a young journalist on The Bulletin he became friends and colleagues with Bob Carr and Malcolm Turnbull. When he first joined The Australian he was posted to China, there to befriend another future leader, Kevin Rudd.When We Were Young and Foolish traces Greg's determined and passionate journey from an underprivileged but emotionally rich childhood in Sydney's inner west, to a world of clashing political fronts. From Greg's early years at a seminary, through political stoushes at university, the surprising period as a union organiser and heady intellectual times at The Bulletin, he also illuminates the formative years and experiences of his...

Fully up-to-date, this biography tells the story of one of world soccer's leading masterminds, and what might be next for the club legend once his Arsenal days draw to a close Few can match the tremendous impact that Arsene Wenger has had since his arrival at Arsenal in 1996. After over 1,000 games with the club, the world-class Frenchman has developed the Gunners into a team capable of challenging for top domestic and European honors every year. His three Premiership titles are evidence of Wenger's unique tactical skill and his famous ability to spot talented young soccer players, while the 2014 FA Cup win silenced those who began to doubt his cerebral approach to management in a season dominated by bitter historical rivalries. The phenomenal Gunners boss, nicknamed "Le Professeur," is one of the most respected managers in English soccer.

Edward III (1312–1377) was the most successful European ruler of his age. Reigning for over fifty years, he achieved spectacular military triumphs and overcame grave threats to his authority, from parliamentary revolt to the Black Death. Revered by his subjects as a chivalric dynamo, he initiated the Hundred Years' War and gloriously led his men into battle against the Scots and the French. In this illuminating biography, W. Mark Ormrod takes a deeper look at Edward to reveal the man beneath the military muscle. What emerges is Edward's clear sense of his duty to rebuild the prestige of the Crown, and through military gains and shifting diplomacy, to secure a legacy for posterity. New details of the splendor of Edward's court, lavish national celebrations, and innovative use of imagery establish the king's instinctive understanding of the bond between ruler and people. With fresh emphasis on how Edward's rule was affected by his family relationships—including his roles as traumatized son, loving husband, and dutiful father—Ormrod gives a valuable new dimension to our understanding of this remarkable warrior king.

Bio of Lord Cardigan, the Victorian aristocrat and soldier.

“Almost indecently readable . . . captures [Burroughs’s] destructive energy, his ferocious pessimism, and the renegade brilliance of his style.”―Vogue With a new preface as well as a final chapter on William S. Burroughs’s last years, the acclaimed Literary Outlaw is the only existing full biography of an extraordinary figure. Anarchist, heroin addict, alcoholic, and brilliant writer, Burroughs was the patron saint of the Beats. His avant-garde masterpiece Naked Lunch shook up the literary world with its graphic descriptions of drug abuse and illicit sex―and resulted in a landmark Supreme Court ruling on obscenity. Burroughs continued to revolutionize literature with novels like The Soft Machine and to shock with the events in his life, such as the accidental shooting of his wife, which haunted him until his death. Ted Morgan captures the man, his work, and his friends―Allen Ginsberg and Paul Bowles among them―in this riveting story of an iconoclast. 18 photographs