I have always had an interest in reading factual information about other people’s lives. I am a realist, and prefer reading non-fiction that is true. I am especially interested in reading inspirational stories from people that have overcome adversity, illness, or discrimination.
When my mother told me that she loved me for the first time, I was dumbstruck, as she had never mentioned this before in all of my 58 years. She obviously was desperate for me to reply in a similar vein, but try as I might I could not.
This is a memoir of the last few years I had with my mother. Neither of us had been overly demonstrative and we had often argued in the past and had never really got on well. However, when I became her carer, a kind of companionship grew from shared memories and by looking at old family photographs. Slowly but surely a closer relationship grew from the ashes of the old.
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I love reading biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. This is a well-researched, enjoyable biography about the young Madeleine Force and her courtship and marriage to John Jacob Astor IV, a man 30 years her senior. The book follows their year-long honeymoon and ill-fated journey back to New York on RMS Titanic's maiden voyage. It also features Madeline’s life after Titanic.
Elton drops celebrity names all over his book, and entertaining stories to go with them. There are many laugh-out-loud moments; one that stands out is when he confronts burglars in the middle of the night after thinking he has put his wig on straight. He has a typically British dry sense of humour, and he is surprisingly self-deprecating. He mixes up laughter with misery to give an overall 'feelgood' factor. A very readable autobiography.
We all need a laugh from time to time, and this book is pleasant light-hearted reading. ‘Ladies of a certain age’ look back with amusement and sometimes embarrassment at their younger selves. All women of a certain age can identify with this group of authors and the silly things we did during our youth way back when there was no internet or mobile phones and we had to actually talk to people face to face!
I was drawn to this book because I had always loved Dave Allen's humour.
Through Ms. Soutar's book I learned of his early life in Ireland and how his attendance at strict Catholic schools run by nuns helped to shape his later stand-up comedy routines. Not everybody enjoys Dave's kind of irreverent humour, but for me he was a comedy legend.
I enjoyed Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler. This book focused on the free spirit and playboy that was Denys George Finch Hatton, portrayed by Robert Redford in the film Out of Africa. Denys was from an upper-class family and lived an unconventional life according to his own rules. He is buried in the Ngong Hills, Nairobi, where he loved to spend his time hunting. He is a perfect example of doing what you want to do and not having to worry about money.
5,309 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about gay men, East Africa, and Michael Jackson.
We think you will like Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, Titanic Love Stories: The True Stories of 13 Honeymoon Couples Who Sailed on the Titanic, and Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band if you like this list.
From Mark's list on the best books on the modern history of cities.
The “urban culture” mentioned in the subtitle of this book will remind us of themes in other books about the modern city: the urban experience as one of flux and diversity, uncertainty and possibility, community and alienation, class and gender, sex and violence. Chauncey focuses on urban geography and spaces, especially boundaries, interstices, and enclaves. Most astonishing, and an important discovery, are the many spaces of “ambivalent toleration” for sexual and gender difference in pre-1930s New York. This meant spaces like the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Broadway, and Harlem, but also working-class, immigrant, ethnic, and racial subcultures where dominant normativities could more easily be ignored and challenged.
New York City was a “gay world before binarism”—before the time when gay and straight were stable identities rather than fluctuating practices, before modern flux and thus possibility were crushed by definitional and moral absolutism. This is a story, brilliantly uncovered and told, that reveals much about suppressed or forgotten histories of modern America and of cities.
From Carla's list on the best Titanic books you need to read.
Gill Paul’s Titanic Love Stories tells the fate of the thirteen honeymoon couples that boarded the doomed ship. It tells stories from society’s elite to third-class passengers from a small country Irish town. Beginning with JJ Astor, Paul tells the story of a man who risked everything for a woman he loved more than anything, showering her with flowers and books to win her favour. In Madeleine, Astor found a future that promised happiness – something he had not had in his previous marriage. Madeleine would love him in a way Astor had never been loved before, who had suffered through a contentious divorce brought by his ex-wife’s extramarital affair. The book finishes with Neal and Eileen McNamee, a newlywed couple that fell in love the moment they met, with Eileen teasing Neal about his moustache and “funny” accent. Eileen converted to Catholicism in order to marry the man she loved, and she was overjoyed at the idea of honeymooning on the Titanic while travelling to America where Neal would be starting a new job at Lipton’s store in New York.
Each newlywed couple’s story is marred with love, hope, and pain. Paul feeds life into Titanic by exploring the ship through the eyes of people who loved each other fiercely. After all, Isidor and Ida Straus were not the only couple who chose to die together.
I was reading Titanic Love Stories when inspiration struck for my protagonists, Georgiana and William. I had a vision of where they’d end up, how their story would develop, and it would represent all the love Titanic’s passengers had felt for each other. If you’re a romantic at heart, you’ll love this non-fiction novel, however, you should be aware: You’ll need tissues.
And lots of them.
From Thomas's list on the best books about rock music and rock bands.
Not many books are written about bands that labor in the trenches for over thirty years with little success. The Fleshtones formed in New York City in the mid 1970s, one of many new wave/punk bands seeking to fulfill their rock-‘n’-roll dream. Today, they are still looking to achieve that dream. Since 1982, they have released over 20 albums, none achieving commercial success. With just the right combination of humor and seriousness (like The Fleshtones themselves), Sweat documents the band’s bad luck, bad management, bad record contracts, bad decisions, and self-destructive behaviors. Always on the brink of breaking through, “The Fleshtones,” as lead-signer Peter Zaremba put it, “have stared in the face of success and laughed.”
