Some bright morning, I'll fly away

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Jason Schmidt

Jason Schmidt wasn't surprised when he came home one day during his junior year of high school and found his father, Mark, crawling around in a giant pool of blood. Things like that had been happening a lot since Mark had been diagnosed with HIV, three years earlier. Jason's life with Mark was full of secrets--about drugs, crime, and sex. If the straights--people with normal lives--ever found out any of those secrets, the police would come. Jason's home would be torn apart. So the rule, since Jason had been in preschool, was never to tell the straights anything. A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me is a funny, disturbing memoir full of brutal insights and unexpected wit that explores the question: How do you find your moral center in a world that doesn't seem to have one?

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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.

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Edvard Radzinsky

The execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family at the hands of revolutionaries in 1918 is one of the pivotal events of the 20th century, an event that brought the 300-year rule of the House of Romanov to a brutal and tragic end and set the tone for the Stalinist atrocities that would follow. The truth behind these murders remained long buried under more than seventy years of myth, legend, and speculation. Then, in a sensational biography that could not have been written before glasnost, noted Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky unearthed solutions to many of the questions that had remained unanswered since the terrible events in Ekaterinburg on the night of July 16-17, 1918. Mining sources long unavailable -- including firsthand accounts of the slaying -- he creates both a fascinating portrait of the monarch and a minute-by-minute account of his terrifying last days. Included is documentation linking the order of execution directly to Lenin, as well as the suggestion that two family members may have survived the ordeal. Included, too, is the testimony of ordinary Russians who at last felt free to contribute their own recollections, documents, and handed-down secrets. Radzinsky weaves together scores of firsthand accounts into a haunting, epic narrative. The Last Tsar is an important and momentous work, one that will stand as the definitive account of the terrible last days of one of Europe's greatest dynasties. - Adapted from dust jacket.

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E. Ethelbert Miller

"Moving beyond the loss of both his father and brother, E. Ethelbert Miller tells the story of how love survived in his family. When Miller was about ten years old, his father told him how he could have left his mother. Years later, now a writer and a father, Miller looks back on that simple remark and how it shaped him. In Fathering Words, Miller explores his development as an African American writer, the responsibility of his chosen career, and his ambitions to raise the consciousness of black people." "Miller's poetry often relies on the voices of women. Here in Fathering Words, he has chosen to write his memoir in two voices. He places his sister's voice on the page next to his own. The result is a duet that tells two stories woven together as one."--BOOK JACKET.