Книги, похожие на «Malachy McCourt, Singing My Him Song»

The iconic broadcasting legend dusts down his suitcase for a final journey around the globe, revisiting locations of significance to his life and career."You might say I'm set in my airways. I'm one of those lucky people whose professional and private lives blend exactly."Alan Whicker, 2007This sumptuous book to accompany the major BBC TV series of the same name, is a glorious celebration of 50 years in front of the camera.For as long as most can remember, Whicker has roamed far and wide in search of the eccentric, the ludicrous and the socially-revealing aspects of everyday life as lived by some of the more colourful of the world's inhabitants.Since the late 1950s, when the long-running Whicker's World documentary was first screened, he has probed and dissected the often secretive and unobserved worlds of the rich and famous, rooting out the most implausible and sometimes ridiculous characters after gaining admittance to the places where they conduct their leisure hours.The great man's legacy contains a number of genuine TV firsts. As well as landmark interviews with figures as diverse as Papa Doc, Paul Getty and The Sultan of Brunei, he was a pioneer, covering subjects like plastic surgery, gay weddings, polygamy, swinging and following gun-toting cops, fly-on-the-wall style, for British screens long before anyone else.This wonderful new book is the end product of a very personal journey. Whicker retraces his steps, catching up with some past interviewees and reflecting on how the world has changed – for good and bad – over the passing of time. Journey of a Lifetime is lyrical, uplifting and peppered with our favourite globetrotter's brand of subtle satire.

Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. ‘The Discomfort Zone’ is his intimate memoir of his growth from a ‘small and fundamentally ridiculous person’ through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America has taken an angry turn away from its mid-century ideals.The stories told here draw on elements as varied as the effects of Kafka's fiction on Franzen's protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds.These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, Franzen narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.