Happy reading.
_______________________
First Sentences
I suppose that on the banks of American Creek in Alaska the hills were green with spruce and birch, and that wild flowers and berries spotted them and the valleys below.
Description:
Author Evelyn Berglund Short recalls her extraordinary life in the wilds of Alaska during the 1920s and '30s with her two sisters, mother, and an old trapper who took them in when Evelyn was 12 and her father died. Her memories revolve around poling boats 280 miles away from civilization to their trapping cabin where they wintered, hunting, fishing, and trapping marmots, beaver and shooting caribou, bears, and moose. Despite only one year of schooling, Evelyn's stories are gripping, honest, and clearly narrated as she braves 70 below zero weather, freezing water, hungry wolves, sled dogs, and the threat of starvation. The four women and trapper lived for ten winters in that cabin, and her stories describe the beauty, humor, and harshness of that world wonderfully.
_______________________
First Sentences
On a bright May morning, so early that the last of the mist was still lingering low over a bend in the Vezere River, a white van drew to a halt on the ridge that overlooked the small French town.
Description:
A small town in France is quietly supervised by a gentle police chief known to all as Bruno. A former soldier who never wears a gun, Bruno knows everyone, understands their lives, and enjoys the quiet life he has built for himself. But then there is a murder in his village, the killing of an old French war hero who had recently moved to St. Denis to live in seclusion near his son, grandson, and unborn great-grandson. The murder appears to be a hate crime, but Bruno cannot understand how this could happen in his peaceful community. Adding local police and state law officers complicates the investigation that Bruno feels may point to activities during the French Occupation during World War II and the Resistance Movement.
_______________________
First Sentences
Miss Stanley was new to the ninth grade that autumn, and we could all sense that she wasn't cut out for it.
Description:
Seven exquisitely constructed stories compose this book and each one is a gem. Full of characters with secrets and relationships that are grudgingly uncovered, Scouting for the Reaper engrosses readers in the common lives that turn unexpected. From the tombstone salesman who meets his former wife now as a customer, to a young girl who discovers via a simple schoolroom blood type experiment that her parents cannot genetically be her real parents, to a reclusive fairy tale researcher to a truck driver who crashes his load of penguins, each story is unexpectedly compelling and unpredictable. Strongly written and completely believable in its characterizations of ordinary people forced to reveal buried stories and make difficult decisions.
_______________________
First Sentences
I was born at Newburgh, New York.My first recollection is of Oswego, Illinois. My father was a miller, and we lived near the flour mill on the Fox River. There were only two houses.
Description:
William S. Hart was not only one of the first Silent Screen movie stars as a gun-toting cowboy, he actually lived a fascinating live among the world of cattle drives, Sioux Indians, gunslingers, bronco busting, and prairie schooners in his unsupervised youth. His autobiography is cleverly told, full of anecdotes of both his upbringing and his film career and early departure into seclusion while he was still on top.
_______________________
First Sentences
Daddy referred to my mother's reproductive organs as "her little flower."
In my earliest baby-boy memories, the man's either looming and glum -- not drunk enough -- or bug-eyed and stubbly after a three-day bender, so liquored up he tilts when he leans down to snatch me off the burlap rags my brothers and sisters piled on the floor of our Kansas shack and called our "sleep blankets."
"You broke her little flower, pig boy!"
--WHACK! --
Description:
Here is a fictionalized memoir of the silent film comedian, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Narrated by Arbuckle, the book reveals Arbuckle's rise from an abusive home of poverty to his early success on the stage as a 375-pound singer and comedian, from his rise to superstardom along with Chaplin and Keaton in the earliest silent films, to the horrific public trials and disgrace when he is accused to a rape/murder occurs. During that period, he is vilified by audiences to the extent that his films are removed from cinemas and he cannot work for years. A gritty, personal, and in-depth look at one man and his rollercoaster life of fame and shame on the stage and screen of that fascinating, greedy era.
What do you do when the world thinks you're a monster, and you know it's the world that's monstrous?
_______________________
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add a comment or book recommendation.