5 Biographies eBooks

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir by Aaron Williams
She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels by Kathleen Hill
A Vietnamese Family Chronicle: Twelve Generations on the Banks of the Hat River by Nguyen Trieu Dan
Michael Graves: Design for Life by Ian Volner
Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption by William Cope Moyers

*Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir by Aaron Williams

English | October 14th, 2017 | ISBN: 1550178059 | 192 Pages | EPUB | 5.87 MB
"At first I'm calm as the trees fall. But suddenly a rat's nest of wood, bent horizontal and cribbed into the trees above us, comes down in a rush of a hundred machine gun snaps. Trees caught in the nest flail around before hitting the ground. Our eyes dart everywhere, trying to keep track of every moment. Trees break free and swing themselves like catapults. Splintered chunks of wood slash through the air like propellers… Falling trees is the most dangerous job in North America."

*She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels by Kathleen Hill

English | October 24, 2017 | ISBN: 1883285720 | EPUB | 225 pages | 5.1 MB
This memoir takes readers around the world, from New York to Nigeria, exploring a life illuminated by novels.
As a child in music class, Kathleen Hill comes upon Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, and the novel prepares her for a drowning death that soon occurs in her own life. Later, recently married and working as a teacher in a newly independent Nigeria, Hill assigns Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to her students, which leads to learning from them about the violent legacy of colonialism, and visiting an old slave port whose disturbing relics make her aware of her benighted American innocence. Also in Nigeria, she is given Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady and deeply ponders her new marriage through the lens of Isabel Archer, remembering her adolescent fear that reading might be a way of avoiding experience.
But is it possible that the act of reading itself may be a form of ardent, transforming experience? In this memoir, Hill reflects on her literary lifetime, reminiscing about her year in northern France, where she resolutely put Flaubert’s Madame Bovary aside to discover, in Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, a detailed guide to the town where she was living, a more acute perspective on the poverty and suffering hidden within its walls. She also shares a tender account of her friendship with writer Diana Trilling, whose failing sight inspired a plan to read aloud Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, an undertaking that required six years to complete.
From an author whose novel Still Waters in Niger was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons is both a wide-ranging autobiographical journey and a deeply felt appreciation of literature and its power to reflect our immediate reality and open windows onto vast new worlds.

*A Vietnamese Family Chronicle: Twelve Generations on the Banks of the Hat River by Nguyen Trieu Dan

English | November 30, 2011 | ISBN: 0786467452 | EPUB | 400 pages | 3.8 MB
The Nguyen of Kim Bai (a village in the Red River delta in Vietnam) traces its ancestry back to at least the 15th century. The region is also considered to be the birthplace of the Vietnamese race (the epic revolt of the Trung sisters against the Chinese occupiers occurred here). The Nguyen family chronicle since 1600, preserved through war and exile, was written (in Chinese script) by the author's grandfather. This document (kept in Nguyen's ancestors' altar) is quoted liberally. A clear and unique picture of Vietnamese personality and culture is provided.

*Michael Graves: Design for Life by Ian Volner

English | October 24, 2017 | ISBN: 1616895632 | PDF | 304 pages | 35.1 MB
One of the most prominent and prolific designers and architects of the late twentieth century, Michael Graves is best known for his popular product designs, including the world-famous Alessi whistling-bird teakettle, and controversial buildings, such as the Portland Building in Oregon, Humana Building in Kentucky, and Dolphin and Swan Hotels at Walt Disney World, Florida. Graves was widely seen as the leading voice of postmodernist architecture, which reintroduced human scale, color, and, sometimes, playful forms into the stark white vocabulary of modernism.
Following a devastating illness that paralyzed him from the chest down, Graves became a tireless designer and advocate of improved health-care products and facilities before his sudden death in 2015. Shortly before this, he began a series of interviews with journalist Ian Volner, which form the basis of this biography of a remarkable designer. Volner also conducted numerous interviews with Graves's family, patrons, colleagues, and friends. What emerges is a meticulously researched, anecdote-rich human story, as well as a primer on the American architecture scene of the past sixty years and a portrait of a man whose deep passion for his art brought pleasure to millions.

*Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption by William Cope Moyers

English | August 28th, 2007 | ASIN: B000U913E8, ISBN: 0670037893, 0143112457 | 299 Pages | EPUB | 0.39 MB
Candid, shocking, and unforgettable, Broken is a haunting and clear-eyed tale that offers hope for all those wrestling with addiction
Unlike some popular memoirs that have fictionalized and romanticized the degradations of drug addiction, Broken is a true-life tale of recovery that stuns and inspires with virtually every page. The eldest son of journalist Bill Moyers, William Cope Moyers relates with unforgettable clarity the story of how a young man with every advantage found himself spiraling into a love affair with crack cocaine that led him to the brink of death-and how a deep spirituality allowed him to conquer his shame, transform his life, and dedicate himself to changing America's politics of addiction.
"William Cope Moyers's lucid, measured tale of his own plunge into crack-addled hell [is] frightening in its very realism." -USA Today