Nine Ms and a Mother Like No Other PDF Download

Author: Martial Bednar
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1440155089
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In the memoir Nine Ms and a Mother Like No Other, Martial Bednar brings warmth, wit, and insight to this entertaining narrative about his family and their trials and triumphs as they survive a messy divorce, cross-country road trips in broken down jitneys, several siblings split into foster homes, and life-threatening medical experiences and in the end, still consider themselves blessed. Told with candor and humor from the kid brother's unique perspective, Bednar begins with a colorful description of his mother Peggy an heiress whose husband walked out after twenty years of marriage and nine children who became a desperate housewife long before it was in vogue. As he chronicles his jaw-dropping childhood adventures, Bednar also introduces his siblings (the nine Ms) and shares the inspirational story of his brother Merrick, a priest-in-the-making whose profound health crises not only strengthen his own faith, but also the fabric of his entire family. This true story often hysterical, at times heartbreaking gives testimony to the inseparable bonds of family, the incredible power of perseverance and prayer, and the life-sustaining gifts of faith, hope, and love.

Author: Richard McCann
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307787346
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
With the breadth and cumulative force of a novel, Mother of Sorrows presents ten interwoven stories of an American family starting out in the post—World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., a world of identical brick houses and sunstruck, treeless lawns, a world of initial hopefulness from which shame and loss have seemingly been banished. This is the story of two adolescent brothers whose father has suddenly died, and of their beautiful and complicated mother, a mother whom the younger son worshipfully imagines as “Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches . . . Our Mother of the Gorgeous Gypsy Earrings . . . Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes . . . Our Mother of Sudden Attentiveness . . . Our Mother of Sudden Anger.” This is the brother who narrates these tales as he looks back thirty years later, the only remaining survivor of a world he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever, a world of sorrow that has held him spellbound even as he has attempted to create a life of his own. Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann’s extraordinary language, Mother of Sorrows introduces us to a voice that is urgent, contemplative, elegant, angry, revelatory, and like no other in contemporary fiction.

Author: Penny Marshall
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547892624
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
From her humble roots in the Bronx to Laverne and Shirley and her unlikely ascent in Hollywood, the beloved actor and director tells the story of her incredible life.

Author: Ariel Leve
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006226947X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
“Sometimes, a child is born to a parent who can’t be a parent, and, like a seedling in the shade, has to grow toward a distant sun. Ariel Leve’s spare and powerful memoir will remind us that family isn’t everything—kindness and nurturing are.” —Gloria Steinem Ariel Leve grew up in Manhattan with an eccentric mother she describes as “a poet, an artist, a selfappointed troublemaker and attention seeker.” Leve learned to become her own parent, taking care of herself and her mother’s needs. There would be uncontrolled, impulsive rages followed with denial, disavowed responsibility, and then extreme outpourings of affection. How does a child learn to feel safe in this topsyturvy world of conditional love? Leve captures the chaos and lasting impact of a child’s life under siege and explores how the coping mechanisms she developed to survive later incapacitated her as an adult. There were material comforts, but no emotional safety, except for summer visits to her father’s home in South East Asia-an escape that was terminated after he attempted to gain custody. Following the death of a loving caretaker, a succession of replacements raised Leve-relationships which resulted in intense attachment and loss. It was not until decades later, when Leve moved to other side of the world, that she could begin to emancipate herself from the past. In a relationship with a man who has children, caring for them yields a clarity of what was missing. In telling her haunting story, Leve seeks to understand the effects of chronic psychological maltreatment on a child’s developing brain, and to discover how to build a life for herself that she never dreamed possible: An unabbreviated life.

Author: Tara Westover
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 039959051X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER • One of the most acclaimed books of our time: an unforgettable memoir about a young woman who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University “Extraordinary . . . an act of courage and self-invention.”—The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • BILL GATES’S HOLIDAY READING LIST • FINALIST: National Book Critics Circle’s Award In Autobiography and John Leonard Prize For Best First Book • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home. “Beautiful and propulsive . . . Despite the singularity of [Westover’s] childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”—Vogue NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • Time • NPR • Good Morning America • San Francisco Chronicle • The Guardian • The Economist • Financial Times • Newsday • New York Post • theSkimm • Refinery29 • Bloomberg • Self • Real Simple • Town & Country • Bustle • Paste • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • LibraryReads • Book Riot • Pamela Paul, KQED • New York Public Library

Author: Gabriela Wiener
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 1632062240
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with human reproduction. Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss. Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru’s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak. With a scientist’s curiosity and a libertine’s unbridled imagination, Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don’t prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision. While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness, Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species. Praise for Sexographies “No other writer in the Spanish-speaking world is as fiercely independent and thoroughly irreverent as Gabriela Wiener. Constantly testing the limits of genre and gender, Wiener´s work as a cronista (which roughly translates, but is by no means a direct synonym, of nonfiction writer) has bravely unveiled truths some may prefer remain concealed about a range of topics, from the daily life of polymorphous desire to the tiring labor of maternity.” —Cristina Rivera Garza, author of The Iliac Crest “This collection of essays [opens] on the outskirts of Lima, jumps to a swinger’s party in Barcelona, and next a squirt expert’s apartment. This book can feel psychologically hazardous to read; it pushes you to answer the questions Wiener asks herself: Would I? Could I? Will I?” —Angela Ledgerwood, Esquire Best Books of 2018 “These are essays of unabashed honesty and uncommon freedom of mind, bravely reported and beautifully composed. I hadn’t known how hungry I’d been for this book, how I’d needed it and wanted other books to be it. Sexographies is an antidote and a revelation, and Gabriela Wiener is a brilliant documenter of sex and life as they really are.” —Kristin Dombek, author of The Selfishness of Others “In her native Peru, Gabriela Wiener has a reputation as a gonzo journalist who takes an active role in whatever subject she investigates, which as often as not involves sex, and not the vanilla variety. In this collection, her first translated into English, we meet a notorious polygamous pornographer; go to 6&9, a Barcelona sex club; interview the cruel Lady Monique de Nemours, a world-class dominatrix; visit Vanessa, a member of the European community of Latin American trans sex workers; get a first-hand look at the perils of threesomes; and explore other topics a tad too risqué to even name in a family newspaper. Suffice to say, Wiener’s free-wheeling style is hugely entertaining.” —Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star "Reading Gabriela Wiener is a joy. Over the years, her work has made me cry, laugh, hurt, and most importantly, dream. Her essays are daring, intimate, and honest, containing the self-awareness of a poet and the sharp focus of a marksman. I'd follow her anywhere." —Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles “One of the most interesting writers of this generation is Gabriela Wiener, a Peruvian journalist best known for her high-spirited explorations of female sexuality.... Wiener is witty and fast-paced; many of her experiences, sexual and otherwise, are hard-won, territories explored and sometimes conquered, despite her neurotic misgivings, with courage and aplomb. Part of her appeal lies in the fact that she sometimes writes about sexual topics that have not been well explored, especially by women, and a sense of incredulity is part of the pleasure of reading her work. ‘Is she really going to do that?’ the reader wonders. ‘Is she really going to write (and so openly) about doing that?’ And then she does, and there’s a slight but perceptible shift in the world because she did.” —Lisa Fetchko, Los Angeles Review of Books “With sizzling prose and journalistic attentiveness, Wiener honors the no-clothes rule. She exposes her readers to not only her body, but also to the neuroses, fears, and fantasies that come with it. True to the first-person style of gonzo journalism, each of Wiener’s fifteen transgressive crónicas pull readers into penetrative commentaries on infidelity, abortion, and threesomes, not to mention the ever-elusory ‘Ninja Squirt.’... Sexographies strikes the delicate balance between carnal and curious…. It [expands] the meaning of what pleasure in life can be, sexual or otherwise.” —Madeline Day, The Paris Review “What Peruvian essayist and “gonzo” journalist, Wiener, does in this collection is endlessly fascinating. Whether experiencing sexual subcultures or an ayahuasca trip, she uses herself as the point of departure to delve into the infinite manifestations of being human.” — Keaton, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX), Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 “Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian sex writer, and Sexografias is a book of her collected essays. However, she doesn’t just stay on the carnal, and uses her explorations of egg donation, swingers parties, cruising, and squirting as channels into meditations on motherhood, death, and immigration, all while staying sharp and funny and wild.” — Alejandra Oliva, Remezcla

Author: Jamie C. Martin
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310354986
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Your personality is a gift, not a liability. This book helps you uncover and embrace the hope, laughter, and joy of using your unique gifts to parent your children. Life as a mom is LOUD, but you long for quiet. When the volume of family life clashes with your personality, frustration, guilt, and overwhelm naturally result. In Introverted Mom, author Jamie C. Martin lifts these burdens from your shoulders, reminding you that your steady strength is exactly what your family needs in this chaotic world. Jamie shares vulnerable stories from her own life as well as thoughts from other introverted mothers, letting you know you're not alone. Her practical suggestions and creative inspiration are enhanced with quotes and insights from four beloved writers--Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, L. M. Montgomery, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Together, Jamie and this band of fellow introverts share their wisdom on . . . Believing that you're enough Self-acceptance that leads to freedom Navigating heartache and disappointment Stretching out of your comfort zone Connecting with God as an introvert Cultivating calm wherever you are Defining for yourself what really matters Whether you've just realized you're an introvert, or if you've known it all along, this book is for you. It's time to honor who you are and savor life as an introverted mom. *Note: Written from a Christian perspective

Author: Jennifer Berney
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1728222842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A story of fertility, feminism, and family Jenn Berney was one of those people who knew she was destined for motherhood—it wasn't a question of if, but when. So when she and her wife Kelly decided to start building their family, they took the next logical step: they went to a fertility clinic. But they soon found themselves entrenched in a medical establishment that didn't know what to do with people like them. With no man factoring into their relationship, doctors were at best embarrassed and at worst disparaging of the couple. Soon Jenn found herself stepping outside of the system determined to disregard her. Looking into the history of fertility and the LGBTQ+ community, she saw echoes of her own struggle. For decades queer people have defied the patriarchy and redefined the nuclear family—and Jenn was walking in their footsteps. Through the ups-and-downs of her own journey, Jenn reflects on a turbulent past that has led her to this point and a bright future worth fighting for. With clarity, determination, and hope, The Other Mothers gives us a wonderful glimpse into the many ways we can become family.

Author: Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101637803
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
* Newbery Honor Book * #1 New York Times Bestseller * Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award * Forbes 25 Top Historical Fiction Books Of All Time selection * Wall Street Journal Best Children's Books of the Year selection * New York Public Library's 100 Books for Reading and Sharing selection An exceptionally moving story of triumph against all odds set during World War II, from the acclaimed author of Fighting Words, and for fans of Fish in a Tree and Number the Stars. Ten-year-old Ada has never left her one-room apartment. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada’s twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn’t waste a minute—she sneaks out to join him. So begins a new adventure for Ada, and for Susan Smith, the woman who is forced to take the two kids in. As Ada teaches herself to ride a pony, learns to read, and watches for German spies, she begins to trust Susan—and Susan begins to love Ada and Jamie. But in the end, will their bond be enough to hold them together through wartime? Or will Ada and her brother fall back into the cruel hands of their mother? This masterful work of historical fiction is equal parts adventure and a moving tale of family and identity—a classic in the making. "Achingly lovely...Nuanced and emotionally acute."—The Wall Street Journal "Unforgettable...unflinching."—Common Sense Media "Touching...Emotionally charged." —Forbes ★ “Brisk and honest...Cause for celebration.” —Kirkus, starred review ★ "Poignant."—Publishers Weekly, starred review ★ "Powerful."—The Horn Book, starred review "Affecting."—Booklist "Emotionally satisfying...[A] page-turner."—BCCB “Exquisitely written...Heart-lifting.” —SLJ "Astounding...This book is remarkable."—Karen Cushman, author The Midwife's Apprentice "Beautifully told."—Patricia MacLachlan, author of Sarah, Plain and Tall "I read this novel in two big gulps."—Gary D. Schmidt, author of Okay for Now "I love Ada's bold heart...Her story's riveting."—Sheila Turnage, author of Three Times Lucky

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593318188
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go is “an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures ... a poignant meditation on love and loneliness” (The Associated Press). • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?