Letters to Nanette

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Claudia O'Keefe

Alice Walker tells a mother's tale of reunion between her daughters: one trapped by tragedy in the dirt-poor South, the other making it big in the city. In an engrossing short story, Marilyn French movingly depicts two young women growing apart in an alcoholic, dysfunctional family. Joy Fielding shapes a humorous but sharp-edged story of the consequences when half-sisters meet for the very first time on a TV talk show. Ann Beattie tells of a pair of friends, as close as sisters, locked in a smothering embrace. In a bittersweet tale, Fae Myenne Ng writes of growing up in a culture that considers a family with only girl children "failed." Recalling her grandmother and great-aunt, Olivia Goldsmith unfolds a dark memoir of sisterhood gone terrifyingly awry. Cristina Garcia relates a poignant account of sisters separated for thirty years, one trapped in Cuba, the other escaped to Miami, reunited at long last. And Rita Dove retells one of the classic fairy tales of sisters, Beauty and the Beast, from the disparate viewpoints of all the women involved.

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Sharon Osbourne

Sharon Osbourne's life has always been an extreme rollercoaster ride. And despite her best efforts, the last few years have been the most dramatic and turbulent of all. In her gripping new autobiography Sharon reveals the truth behind the headlines. There have been times of huge joy and pleasure - becoming a grandmother for the first time and seeing both Jack and Kelly come through testing times to find happiness and contentment at last. But there has also been a lot of heartache. Sharon describes the shocking and unexpected battle to save her thirty-year marriage to Ozzy - and the devastating betrayal that lay behind their separation. She also lived through every mother's worst nightmare when Jack was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis - and writes movingly of her hopes and fears for her beloved son. A tough but fair judge on the X Factor, Sharon is just as hard on herself. She is honest about the mistakes she has made - from misguided plastic surgery to her battles with her weight and body image. Filled with laughter, tears and hard-won wisdom, Unbreakable is as funny, frank and fearless as Sharon herself.

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Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin

"The first full-scale biography of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic age, Enrico Fermi. Enrico Fermi is unquestionably the most famous scientist to come from Italy since Galileo, so revered that he's known as The Pope of Physics. A modest, unassuming man, Fermi was nevertheless one of the most productive and creative scientists of the twentieth century, one of the fathers of the Atomic Bomb and a Nobel Prize winner whose contributions to physics and nuclear technology live on today, with the largest particle accelerator in the United States and the nation's most significant science and technology award both bearing his name. In this, the first major biography of Fermi in English, Gino Segre, professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, brings this scientific visionary to life. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi's life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century--including the birth of one of its most controversial disciplines, nuclear physics--this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves"--

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Jim Jones

By looking sympathetically yet realistically at the lives of five people who knew Kerouac intimately, Jones creates a new picture of the Beat legacy that foregrounds the "minor characters" and accurately depicts the heroism of their not-so-ordinary lives. Long before the trend of debunking Kerouac and the Beats had begun, Jones perceived that there were other stories to be told. Use My Name presents the saga of five people whose lives were joined, often in emotional or legal conflict, by their relationship with the same man, the King of the Beatniks.