The Erratics

Download or read book The Erratics written by Vicki Laveau-Harvie and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two sisters reckon with their toxic parents through the decline and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and with the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humor and brutal honesty in this award-winning “brilliantly-written memoir... [that] reads like a novel” (best-selling author Margaret Atwood via Twitter). When her elderly mother is hospitalized unexpectedly, Vicki Laveau-Harvie and her sister travel to their parents' ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help their father. Estranged from their parents for many years, they are horrified by what they discover on their arrival. For years their mother has camouflaged her manic delusions and savage unpredictability, and over the decades she has managed to shut herself and her husband away from the outside world, systematically starving him and making him a virtual prisoner in his own home. Rearranging their lives to be the daughters they were never allowed to be, the sisters focus their efforts on helping their father cope with the unending manipulations of their mother and encounter all the pressures that come with caring for elderly parents. And at every step they have to contend with their mother, whose favorite phrase during their childhood was: "I'll get you and you won't even know I'm doing it." Set against the natural world of the Canadian foothills ("in winter the cold will kill you, nothing personal"), this memoir—at once dark and hopeful—shatters precedents about grief, anger, and family trauma with surprising tenderness and humor.

Download or read book Erratic Facts written by Kay Ryan and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Clear and lucid” poems from a US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner who “journeys through the landscape of memory, consciousness, loss, and love” (The Washington Post). Kay Ryan is acclaimed for her highly relatable, deeply insightful poems. Erratic Facts is her first new collection since the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Best of It, and it is animated with her signature swift, clearheaded, lyrical style. At once witty and melancholy, playful and heartfelt, Ryan examines enormous subjects—existence, consciousness, love, loss—in compact poems that have immensely powerful resonance. Her sly rhymes and strong cadences convey both musicality and wisdom. While these pieces are composed of the same brevity and vitality that have characterized her singular voice over the course of more than twenty years, her imagination is more eccentric and daring than ever. Erratic Facts solidifies Ryan’s place at the pinnacle of American poetry. “Read a poem once and take in its crisp rhythms, subtle rhymes, and arresting images. Read it again and detect its hide-and-seek metaphors and meanings. . . . [Ryan’s] quantum poems pose resonant questions of physics and metaphysics, of attentiveness and caring on scales intimate and universal.” —Booklist

Download or read book Poetic License written by Gretchen Cherington and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she’d recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents’ well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth—even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her father’s extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father’s best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s to Cherington’s consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.

Download or read book Dead Rock Stars written by Wes Funk and published by . This book was released on 2015-02 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dear Highlights written by Christine French Cully and published by Highlights Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique, inside look at American childhood through the conversations between Highlights magazine and its young readers and a call to grown-ups to make time to actively listen to the children in their lives. Every year, tens of thousands of children write to Highlights magazine, sharing their hopes and dreams, worries and concerns, as if they were writing to a trusted friend. From the beginning, the editors at Highlights have answered every child individually. Longtime editor in chief Christine French Cully has curated a collection of this remarkable correspondence (letters, emails, drawings, and poems) in Dear Highlights--revealing an intimate and inspiring 75-year conversation between America’s children and its leading children’s magazine. From the timeless, everyday concerns of friendship, family, and school, to the deeper issues of identity, sexuality, divorce, and grief, here is a unique time capsule of American childhood in the voices--and the very handwriting--of children themselves. The book captures a child's-eye view of some of the most important events of the past 75 years: the COVID-19 pandemic, 9/11, the Challenger Disaster, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Cully’s insightful narrative becomes a call to action for adults to lean in and listen to children, to make sure our kids know that they matter and what they think matters, and to assure them that they have the power to become people who change the world. By turns funny, heartbreaking, moving, and enlightening, Dear Highlights will cause readers to reflect, to listen, and to embrace the children in their lives. From the foreword by nationally syndicated columnist Amy Dickinson: “In times of great stress or trouble, Mr. Rogers advised children: ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ That’s exactly what children writing to ‘Dear Highlights’ find when they put pen to paper: helpers whose open-minded trust and kindness surely has made our world a better place.”

Download or read book Erratic Wandering written by Christy Butler and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-01-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Erratic Wandering." An Explorer's Hiking Guide to Astonishing Boulders of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont: New destinations and fun adventures for individuals, couples or the entire family. A total of 123 chapters richly enhanced with more photographs, more GPS coordinates, more maps, and directions that will direct hikers and outdoor enthusiasts to some of the most astonishing glacial boulders, balanced or perched rocks that are scattered throughout the nooks and crannies of northern New England. Vermont 34, Maine 22, and New Hampshire 67 chapters.

Download or read book Just Don't Be an Asshole written by Kara Kinney Cartwright and published by Rodale Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Take it from a mom who raised two teenage boys into actual humans—yes, they can and do change. This is her tough love and candid advice on being a good guy in a world full of assh*les. Have you ever returned the family car with less than a quarter tank left? Or gotten a technical in a rec-league basketball game? If so, you might be an assh*le—or you’re at least acting like one. But there’s hope for you yet! As it turns out, everyone needs to learn one major lesson to safely avoid assh*le territory: Other people are also humans. (Whoa.) This frank, funny, and necessary guidebook contains everything young men need to know to have positive interactions, make better decisions, and recognize when they’re being jerks. Things like, just don’t be an assh*le . . . • To your family: Parents are not your servants. • To your friends: They’ll laugh at you, not with you. • At work: No one wants to hear your podcast idea. • To women: “Are you up?” doesn’t qualify as romance. • Online: If you wouldn’t do it in real life, don’t do it. • In real life: People unlike you are also people. • To yourself: It’s okay not to have all the answers. And if someone got you this book, don’t be an assh*le to them. Instead, consider this a gentle nudge in a different direction.