This biography about England's Queen Elizabeth II has more laugh-out-loud moments than any other biography I've ever read, while also being poignant, insightful, and deeply respectful. The 112 chapters offer more than a standard biography as they show who she was by presenting her interactions with different people and situations throughout her life. A chapter on her corgis, the only creatures allowed to treat her like a normal human being, tells how a crown-approved book on their lineage, which extends to 14 generations during her lifetime, reads like the Old Testament: "And Exekias begat Manassas: and Manassas begat Amon..." Other chapters tell how world leaders and captains of the industry turned to jelly to meet her. We also get to be a fly on the wall during the cringe-worthy awkward conversations when she posed for Lucien Freud to paint her portrait. Together, these well-researched glimpses of her life provide a kaleidoscopic view of a woman with simple but strong values, who used her power to represent her country and the monarchy that served it.
With equal measures of wit and wisdom, the author of 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret draws a deeply original, hilarious, and telling portrait of the Queen herself.
She was the most famous person on earth; she first appeared on the cover of Time magazine at the age of three. When she died, few people were old enough to recall a time when she was not alive.
Her likeness has been reproduced―in photographs, on stamps, on the notes and coins of thirty different currencies―more than any since Jesus. It is probable that, over the course of her ninety-six years, she was…
We've all heard the sound-bites of Lisa Marie Presley's life -- the only daughter of Elvis Presley. How she lost her father when she was so young. Her failed music career. Her marriage to Michael Jackson, and then Nicolas Cage. The mother who lost her only son and who like her father before her, died of addition issues far too young. Here is the inside story of the woman at the center of those headlines. Including transcripts of tapes Lisa Marie Presley made shortly before she died, and completed with passages written by her daughter Riley Keough. This is an honest story of a complicated woman born into extroadinary circumstances. It does not hold back or sugarcoat Lisa Marie Presley's bizarre upbringing or her mistakes. Instead, it offers a deeply-felt no-holds-barred portrayal of a woman whose deep and abiding love of family -- from her famous father to her children -- was everything.
Born to an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley tells her whole story for the first time in this raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir faithfully completed by her daughter, Riley Keough.
In 2022, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help finally finish her long-conceived memoir.
A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words; never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and grieved.
Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, lay in her bed,…
This book by music critic Ann Powers is more than a biography of Joni Mitchell. It is also a biography of her albums, including musical influences at the time, collaborators, the instruments she played, and the special tunings she developed. My favorite part is that it also includes the personal things going on in her life while she wrote specific songs -- the lovers, the breakups, the child she gave away and later reunited with, and her love/hate relationship with fame. All these things are spelled out in the same relentless honesty as Joni Mitchell's confessional-style music. This makes the book a must-read volume for fans of her music. For everyone else, it offers a powerful story of how a girl born in ordinary circumstances sacrificed everything to follor her gift, then hone it, and share it with the world to ultimately become a music legend.
Celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself.
“What you are about to read is not a standard account of the life and work of Joni Mitchell. Instead, it’s a tale of long journeying through a life that changed popular music: of a homesick wanderer forging ahead on routes of her own invention, and of me on her trail, heading toward the ringing of her voice.”
Young unwanted Anabel finds a surprising ally when she discovers that her “crazy” Grandma Maisy is not insane but harbors a secret past. As a teen in the 1920s, Maisy had run away from her home on the prairie to escape a cruel marriage. With nothing but a feisty horse, young Maisy takes on the old west. She forms a travelling rodeo show with other young women – misfits and runaways with everything to prove and nothing to lose.
Things go well until they are betrayed, forcing Maisy to do something so terrible that she hides deep inside herself for many years. As Anabel draws her out, together the broken grandmother and her granddaughter form a bond of kinship and love and self-respect that heals them both.
