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5 Biographies eBooks

Posted by wblue on 3-11-2017, 11:42 @ English eBooks

5 Biographies eBooks

Ivan Castro, Jim DeFelice, "Fighting Blind: A Green Beret's Story of Extraordinary Courage"
Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years by Michael J. Collins
Feverland: A Memoir in Shards by Alex Lemon
Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum by Robert Andrew Parker
Sharon B. Smith, "Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel: An Unlikely Hero of the Civil War"

*Ivan Castro, Jim DeFelice, "Fighting Blind: A Green Beret's Story of Extraordinary Courage"

ISBN: 1250076544 | 2016 | EPUB | 304 pages | 743 KB
Fighting was a practiced routine for Lieutenant Ivan Castro. But when a mortar round struck the rooftop of his sniper’s post in Iraq, he found himself in a battle more difficult than even he could have imagined. The direct hit killed two other soldiers and nearly claimed Castro’s life as well. Mangled by shrapnel and badly burned, Castro was medevac’d to Germany more dead than alive. His lungs were collapsed. He couldn’t hear. One eye had been blown out, the nerve to the other severed.
In the weeks and months that followed, Castro would find that physical darkness was nothing compared to the emotional darkness of loss and despair. Desperate for a reason to live, he eventually fought his way back to health through exercise and a single-minded goal: running a marathon. Once he set his course, there was no stopping him. Stubborn to a point that at times bordered on insanity, he managed not only to recover but to return to active duty. Since 2007, he has run over two dozen marathons, including the Boston Marathon in 2013, where he was one of the runners diverted when the bombs exploded.
Today, Castro helps prepare soldiers for combat, working exactly as if he were “sighted.” Fighting Blind, this frankly told account of his struggle through adversity, the highs and lows and the always bumpy road in between, is a story of hope and perseverance against the odds: an Unbroken for the present generation.

*Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon's First Years by Michael J. Collins

English | February 1, 2005 | ISBN: 0312337787, 0312352697 | EPUB | 320 pages | 0.4 MB
When Michael Collins decides to become a surgeon, he is totally unprepared for the chaotic life of a resident at a major hospital. A natural overachiever, Collins' success, in college and medical school led to a surgical residency at one of the most respected medical centers in the world, the famed Mayo Clinic. But compared to his fellow residents Collins feels inadequate and unprepared. All too soon, the euphoria of beginning his career as an orthopedic resident gives way to the feeling he is a counterfeit, an imposter who has infiltrated a society of brilliant surgeons.
This story of Collins' four-year surgical residency traces his rise from an eager but clueless first-year resident to accomplished Chief Resident in his final year. With unparalleled humor, he recounts the disparity between people's perceptions of a doctor's glamorous life and the real thing: a succession of run down cars that are towed to the junk yard, long weekends moonlighting at rural hospitals, a family that grows larger every year, and a laughable income.
Collins' good nature helps him over some of the rough spots but cannot spare him the harsh reality of a doctor's life. Every day he is confronted with decisions that will change people's lives-or end them-forever. A young boy's leg is mangled by a tractor: risk the boy's life to save his leg, or amputate immediately? A woman diagnosed with bone cancer injures her hip: go through a painful hip operation even though she has only months to live? Like a jolt to the system, he is faced with the reality of suffering and death as he struggles to reconcile his idealism and aspiration to heal with the recognition of his own limitations and imperfections.
Unflinching and deeply engaging, Hot Lights, Cold Steel is a humane and passionate reminder that doctors are people too. This is a gripping memoir, at times devastating, others triumphant, but always compulsively readable.

*Feverland: A Memoir in Shards by Alex Lemon

English | September 19th, 2017 | ISBN: 1571313362 | 233 Pages | EPUB | 1.31 MB
Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.
In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America―and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to be here, now? Lemon asks. How to be here, good? Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, this is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.

*Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum by Robert Andrew Parker

English | January 8, 2008 | ISBN: 0375839658, 0553533924 | EPUB | 40 pages | 9.4 MB
Regardless of whether they’ve heard of jazz or Art Tatum, young readers will appreciate how Parker uses simple, lyrical storytelling and colorful, energetic ink-and-wash illustrations to show the world as young Art Tatum might have seen it. Tatum came from modest beginnings and was nearly blind, but his passion for the piano and his acute memory for any sound that he heard drove him to become a virtuoso who was revered by both classical and jazz pianists alike. Included in the back matter is a biography and bibliography.

*Sharon B. Smith, "Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel: An Unlikely Hero of the Civil War"

ISBN: 1493019244 | 2016 | EPUB | 288 pages | 21 MB
During the Civil War and throughout the rest of the nineteenth century there was no star that shone brighter than that of a small red horse who was known as Stonewall Jackson s Little Sorrel. Robert E. Lee s Traveller eventually became more familiar but he was mostly famous for his looks. Not so with the little sorrel. Early in the war he became known as a horse of great personality and charm, an eccentric animal with an intriguing background. Like Traveller, his enduring fame was due initially to the prominence of his owner and the uncanny similarities between the two of them. The little red horse long survived Jackson and developed a following of his own. In fact, he lived longer than almost all horses who survived the Civil War as well as many thousands of human veterans. His death in 1886 drew attention worthy of a deceased general, his mounted remains have been admired by hundreds of thousands of people since 1887, and the final burial of his bones (after a cross-country, multi-century odyssey) in 1997 was the occasion for an event that could only be described as a funeral, and a well-attended one at that. Stonewall Jackson s Little Sorrel is the story of that horse."