Category: Biographical

15 fighters . 15 stories .

Tunney Hunsaker.  Henry Cooper.  George Chuvalo.

Brian London. Karl Mildenberger. Joe Frazier. Jurgen Blin.

Joe Bugner.Ken Norton. George Foreman. Chuck Wepner.

Ron Lyle.Jean-Pierre Coopman . Earnie Shavers. Larry Holmes

Michael Ondaatje’s autobiographical novelRunning in the Family is an imaginative reconstruction of the author’s family history. A mixture of fact and fiction, the novel chronicles Ondaatje’s attempt to gain insight into his own identity by better understanding his parents and relatives.

In the novel Ondaatje returns to Ceylon for the first time since his childhood in order to meet relatives and learn about his family. The novel consists of stories about Ondaatje’s aristocratic family interspersed with accounts of Ondaatje’s experiences while visiting Ceylon. As the novel progresses, the reader learns that Ondaatje left Ceylon to live with his mother in England and that his father, who remained in Ceylon, has died in his absence. It becomes increasingly clear that Ondaatje’s desire to understand his family is at bottom a desire to know and understand his father. His lack of knowledge about his father is an empty space in his identity and this emptiness haunts him throughout the novel.

As he meets various friends and relatives and listens to their stories Ondaatje struggles to understand his father’s life and his father’s relationship with his mother. He also struggles to put to rest fears he has about his father’s character. Ondaatje hears stories about his father’s wildness and drunkenness, about his mother’s dramatic flair, about his parents’ arguments, and about the circumstances surrounding their divorce. He comes to realize that while these exaggerated and contradictory stories capture the spirit of the 1930’s generation of aristocrats in Ceylon, they tell him nothing of what he really wants to know, nothing of his father’s thoughts and experiences, nothing of “the closeness between two people,” of how his parents “grew in the shade of each other’s presence.” In the end, Ondaatje recognizes that his father will remain “one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut.” Ondaatje can rely upon only faith and imaginative insight as means of understanding his father and of filling the empty space in his own identity.

Running in the Family has been appreciated for its striking imagery as well as for its carefully crafted prose. Although it was initially criticized for failing to address the political realities in Ceylon, the novel has since been accepted as an evocative depiction of the relationship between one’s identity and one’s family history.

“Running in the Family – Summary” Society and Self, Critical Representations in Literature Ed. David Peck. eNotes.com, Inc. 1997 eNotes.com 16 Apr, 2018 <http://www.enotes.com/topics/running-family#summary-the-work>

One of the most respected artists in popular music today, Jewel is much more than a music industry success with her debut album selling more than 10 million copies.

Before her gifted songwriting comes an even more individual art: Poetry.

Now available in paperback, A Night without Armor highlights the poetry of Jewel taken from her journals which are both intimate and inspiring, to be embraced and enjoyed.

Writing poems and keeping journals since childhood, Jewel has been searching for truth and meaning, turning to her words to record, to discover, and to reflect.

In A Night Without Armor, her first collection of poetry, Jewel explores the fire of first love, the lessons of betrayal, and the healing of intimacy. She delves into matters of the home, the comfort of family, the beauty of Alaska, and the dislocation of divorce.

Frank and honest, serious and suddenly playful, A Night Without Armor is a talented artist’s intimate portrait of what makes us uniquely human.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   hardcover   139 pages )

Antonia Fraser’s Warrior Queens are those women who have both ruled and led in war. They include Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, Isabella of Spain, the Rani of Jhansi, and the formidable Queen Jinga of Angola. With Boadicea as the definitive example, her female champions from other ages and civilisations make a fascinating and awesome assembly. Yet if Boadicea’s apocryphal chariot has ensured her place in history, what are the myths that surround the others? And how different are the democratically elected if less regal warrior queens of recent times: Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir? This remarkable book is much more than a biographical selection. It examines how Antonia Fraser’s heroines have held and wrested the reins of power from their (consistently male) adversaries.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   383 pages )

AN Wilson – biographer, historian, novelist, columnist, provocateur – is the author of more than 40 books, including, most recently, Hitler: A Short Biography. His 1998 biography of Tolstoy, which won the Whitbread prize, is now being reissued.

You wrote recently that you used to regard Tolstoy as a mystery but he now makes sense. What did you mean?

I was perhaps a little bit too inclined to think of a great conversion in the middle of his life. But when you go back and read the stuff he wrote as a soldier, and the war passages in War and Peace, it’s clear he’s moving towards the position of pacifism and hatred of war that dominated the second half of his life. Similarly, inWar and Peace, the emphasis on peasant wisdom and the vacuity of the upper classes in Russia, it’s all there.

How would you sum up his writing?

The word that leads you in is realism. When I was writing this book, Anthony Powell said to me: “Why do you want to waste your time writing about him, his books are just cinema?” I know what he means, particularly if you turn to Dostoevsky, and there’s all that agitation and innerness, as if you’re inside people’s heads. Whereas with Tolstoy it’s as if you’re in the room. In many ways, he’s an extraordinarily detached writer. As I’ve got older, I’ve become keener on this.

Which novelists would you place alongside Tolstoy?

He really wrote in the tradition of history writing, which confuses people. He was writing between history and art, and to that extent the only writer who is remotely like him is Walter Scott. And Balzac to a certain extent.

( Courtesy of The Guardian,   572 pages )

 

My Brother, Ernest Hemingway was the only biography Ernest knew about, and he was pleased with it–although he asked his brother to postpone publication while he was still alive. First published in 1962, Leicester’s biography provides a revealing and intimate portrait of one of the great writers of our century. Ernest Hemingway was a legend in his own time, whose life was as dramatic as any of the characters in his novels and short stories. He won both the Nobel and the Pulitzer prizes for literature, and the literary style he created has been imitated but never matched.

Leicester was the archetypal kid brother, 16 years younger than the great man, whom he adored and in whose footsteps he followed, becoming a respected writer, sharing his brother’s love for high risk and adventure, and, when his health failed, choosing to end his own life as Ernest had done. In this poignant biography, Leicester has given us insight into his world-renowned brother’s life and career as no one else could. His reminiscences allow us to better understand what prompted so many of the familiar Hemingway responses, and the experiences from which he derived material for his novels and stories.

( Courtesy of Google Books,   255 pages )