The story of my father

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Carolyn See

In this bittersweet and beautifully written memoir Carolyn See embarks on nothing less than a reevaluation of the American Dream. "This is a history," she writes, "of how drugs and drink have worked in our family for the last fifty - actually it turned out to be closer to a hundred - years. In varying degrees, it's history seen through a purple haze. It's full of secrets and chaos and distortions, and secretly remembered joys. I'm beginning to think it may be the unwritten history of America.". Although it features a clan in which dysfunction was something of a family tradition, Dreaming is no "victim's story" or temperance tract. With a wry humor and not a trace of self-pity, See writes of fights and breakups and hard times, but also of celebration and optimism in the face of adversity. The story of See's own family speaks for the countless people who reached for the shining American vision, found it eluded their grasp, and then tried to make what they had glitter as best they could. Dreaming is about yearning, imagining, and reinventing oneself, about rolling with the punches and continuing on. In this fiercely funny and deeply empathetic book, See shows us that the wild life, for better and worse, has made us what we are.

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Helen Keller

Helen Keller graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1904, and the present book was written and published in her sophomore year with the aid and encouragement of Charles Townsend Copeland, her English teacher, and the literary critic, John Albert Macy. It contains her own account of the opening chapters of her life, a selection from her letters, and a description of her education and early development drawn mainly from the records of Annie Sullivan, the beloved "Teacher," through whose guidance and companionship Miss Keller emerged from darkness, silence, and isolation into the great world. - Introduction. The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's own account of how she miraculously triumphed over blindness and deafness-and became one of the most inspiring and intriguing figures of our time.

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Michael Sparrow

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Dr Sparrow is back, coping with more bizarre, macabre and hilarious situations. Following his successful debut with "Country Doctor: Hilarious True Stories from a Country Practice", Dr Sparrow once more guides us through the daily rounds of the weird and wonderful in his practice on the Devon/Cornwall border. What would you do if faced with the unsuccessful resuscitation of the wrong patient, being held at gunpoint as a suspected terrorist or confronting a blind man who refuses to stop driving? And what about the little old lady who presents you with a supermarket bag stuffed with GBP20 notes? Add to this jets crashing on the runway, fleeting glimpses of the Royal Genitalia and the haunting tale of the suicidal stranger and an abducted child - and you will start to have some idea of the unpredictable life of Dr Sparrow.

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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.