Recommendations based on "Taft A Novel"

“Like all writers of original genius, Miss McCullers convinces us that we have missed something which was plainly to be seen in the real world . . . She is a master of peculiar perception and an incomparable storyteller.” —V. S. PritchettUpon publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its compassionate glimpses into its characters’ inner lives, her story gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated. In The Member of the Wedding, McCullers tells the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother’s upcoming marriage. It is a coming-of-age story that showcases McCullers at her most sensitive and enduring best.

Product Description This is an account on audiotape of NASA engineer Hickam's high school days in West Virginia in the 1950s. When 14-year-old Homer watches Sputnik fly over his home town, his life is changed forever. His group of "Rocket Boy" friends launch their own rocket into space, and unite a town and a family. Amazon.com Review Inspired by Werner von Braun and his Cape Canaveral team, 14-year-old Homer Hickam decided in 1957 to build his own rockets. They were his ticket out of Coalwood, West Virginia, a mining town that everyone knew was dying--everyone except Sonny's father, the mine superintendent and a company man so dedicated that his family rarely saw him. Hickam's smart, iconoclastic mother wanted her son to become something more than a miner and, along with a female science teacher, encouraged the efforts of his grandiosely named Big Creek Missile Agency. He grew up to be a NASA engineer and his memoir of the bumpy ride toward a gold medal at the National Science Fair in 1960--an unprecedented honor for a miner's kid--is rich in humor as well as warm sentiment. Hickam vividly evokes a world of close communal ties in which a storekeeper who sold him saltpeter warned, "Listen, rocket boy. This stuff can blow you to kingdom come." Hickam is candid about the deep disagreements and tensions in his parents' marriage, even as he movingly depicts their quiet loyalty to each other. The portrait of his ultimately successful campaign to win his aloof father's respect is equally affecting.--Wendy Smith From Publishers Weekly Great memoirs must balance the universal and the particular. Too much of the former makes it overly familiar; too much of the latter makes readers ask what the story has to do with them. In his debut, Hickam, a retired NASA engineer, walks that line beautifully. On one level, it's the story of a teenage boy who learns about dedication, responsibility, thermodynamics and girls. On the other hand, it's about a dying way of life in a coal town where the days are determined by the rhythms of the mine and the company that controls everything and everybody. Hickam's father is Coalwood, W.Va.'s mine superintendent, whose devotion to the mine is matched only by his wife's loathing for it. When Sputnik inspires "Sonny" with an interest in rockets, she sees it not as a hobby but as a way to escape the mines. After an initial, destructive try involving 12 cherry bombs, Sonny and his cronies set up the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA). From Auk I (top altitude, six feet), through Auk XXXI (top altitude, 31,000 feet), the boys experiment with nozzles, fins and, most of all, fuel, graduating from a basic black powder to "rocket candy" (melted potassium chlorate and sugar) to "Zincoshine" (zinc, sulfur, moonshine). But Coalwood is the real star, here. Teachers, clergy, machinists, town gossips, union, management, everyone become co-conspirators in the BCMA's explosive three-year project. Hickam admits to taking poetic license in combining characters and with the sequence of events, and if there is any flaw, it's that the people and the narrative seem a little too perfect. But no matter how jaded readers have become by the onslaught of memoirs, none will want to miss the fantastic voyage of BCMA, Auk and Coalwood. First serial to Life. 10-city author tour. (Sept.) FYI: Rocket Boys is currently in production at Universal, which plans to release it later this year.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Hickam recalls his distinguished NASA career, which all started when he saw Sputnik as a little boy and began designing and launching homemade rockets. With a ten-city author tour.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist In 1957, the national panic set off bySputnik I reached into the hollows of Coalwood, West Virginia, the setting for this affecting story. The second son of a coal mine's manager, teenage Homer went bo

A stunning, lyrical novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians about a young girl and the family truths that will haunt her for the rest of her life.“A girl comes of age against the knife.”So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a white mother and a Cherokee father, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit in the rural town of Breathed, Ohio, is one of poverty and violence—both from outside the family and, devastatingly, from within. But despite the hardships she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters, and her father’s brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all to which she bears witness, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write.Inspired by generations of her family, Tiffany McDaniel sets out to free the past by delivering this heartbreaking yet magical story—a remarkable novel that establishes her as one of the most important voices in American fiction.

That's the good thing with stories. There's always a chance they can come true. Felix is lucky. Unlike the other children in the orphanage, he's certain his parents will come back for him one day. And whatever the Nazis do and however many books they burn, Felix's imagination provides him and his companions with an endless supply of stories - stories that protect them when they're on the run, shield them from the violent madness all around, give them hope when all seems lost, and one day may even save Felix's life. Once & Then is a spellbinding story of hope and imagination in the most terrible circumstances. However my story turns out, I'll never forget how lucky I am.

A profound portrait of family dynamics in the rural South and “an essential novel” (The New Yorker)“As close to flawless as any reader could ask for . . . The living language [Allison] has created is as exact and innovative as the language of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye.” —The New York Times Book ReviewThe publication of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina was a landmark event that won the author a National Book Award nomination and launched her into the literary spotlight. Critics have likened Allison to Harper Lee, naming her the first writer of her generation to dramatize the lives and language of poor whites in the South. Since its appearance, the novel has inspired an award-winning film and has been banned from libraries and classrooms, championed by fans, and defended by critics.Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family—a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard-drinking men who shoot up each other’s trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly. At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective. When her stepfather Daddy Glen, “cold as death, mean as a snake,” becomes increasingly more vicious toward her, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that tests the loyalty of her mother, Anney—and leads to a final, harrowing encounter from which there can be no turning back.

From daughter of musical visionary Frank Zappa, Moon Unit Zappa, comes a memoir of growing up in her unconventional household in 1970s Los Angeles, coming of age as part of the MTV generation in the 1980s as the “Valley Girl,” and finding herself after losing her father, then her mother, and the fracturing of her longest relationships.I got my first journal when I was five, for Christmas, then every year after I’d get a new one. They were hardbound in black leather with gold embellishments on the cover and along the paper edges. So fancy. These books felt important. I believed I had a responsibility to do excellent work in them, to match their external beauty and honor the dead trees I held in my hands, a concept my mother had recently illuminated along with explaining hamburgers were deceased cows. Plus, the diaries were from Gail and Frank, my mother and my father, with the inscription to me in his handwriting, so I put undue pressure on myself to turn these blank nothings into weighty somethings, as I saw my idol dad doing on his large, butter-colored music paper.When I wasn’t writing short stories about my camels T’mershi Duween and Sinini, or about aliens or ballerinas or nuns, or alien ballerina nuns, I’d report on the happenings in the house or the world at large. I was political and wrote a letter to President Ford to get him to stop men from clubbing baby harp seals. I was ambitious and practiced signing my autograph in various handwriting styles. I was complimentary and wrote a letter to Tina Turner to let her know she is almost as good a dancer as me. I was boy crazy for Shawn Cassidy and wrote his name everywhere, followed by pages of scrawling my new name “Moon Unit Cassidy” in loopy cursive. I used my journals like a secret best friend I could tell anything to: “I’m sad. I wish my dad would take me with him to Europe.” When I still lived at home and had no privacy, I’d write in code about really secret stuff so I had somewhere safe to be the real me, to vent about my feelings with impunity.As time went on, I loosened the reins on my dad-comparing and perfectionism in my journals. And in life. I had no choice. Rightly or wrongly, I believed I would never be as good as my dad, so I had to learn to live with plain old me.For Moon Unit Zappa, processing a life so unique, so punctuated by the whims of creative genius, the tastes of popular culture, the calculus of celebrity and the nature of fractured love has at times been eviscerating, at others, illuminating. Yes, this is a book about growing up in the shadows of Frank Zappa, in a sexually free, but also dysfunctional world in 1970s LA.And as we careen into the 1980s, the style and the music and the tone changes—but Moon remains the constant, trying to find herself in a very confusing, everchanging equation—that of her family and the relationship with fame.It is Moon’s deep sense of humor and humility that keeps her grounded, and keeps this memoir pinned to the ground. Earth to Moon is a creative, colorful, and wonderful lesson in growing into oneself.

From first-time novelist Jordan Sonnenblick, a brave and beautiful story that will make readers laugh and break their hearts at the same time. Thirteen-year-old Steven has a totally normal life: he plays drums in the All-Star Jazz band, has a crush on the hottest girl in the school, and is constantly annoyed by his five-year-old brother, Jeffrey. But when Jeffrey is diagnosed with leukemia, Steven's world is turned upside down. He is forced to deal with his brother's illness and his parents' attempts to keep the family in one piece. Salted with humor and peppered with devastating realities, DRUMS, GIRLS, AND DANGEROUS PIE is a heartwarming journey through a year in the life of a family in crisis.

A New York Times 2016 Notable Book An immediate national best seller and instant classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. Richard Russo returns to North Bath--"a town where dishonesty abounds, everyone misapprehends everyone else and half the citizens are half-crazy" (The New York Times)--and the characters who made Nobody's Fool a beloved choice of book clubs everywhere. Everybody's Fool is classic Russo, filled with humor, heart, hard times, and people you can't help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so human. Everybody's Fool picks up roughly a decade since we were last with Miss Beryl and Sully on New Year's Eve 1984. The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it's hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years . . . the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't still best friends . . . Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one). We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who's obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might've been about to run off with, before dying in a freak accident . . . Bath's mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing . . . and then there's Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there's Charice Bond--a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer's office--as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station. A crowning achievement--"like hopping on the last empty barstool surrounded by old friends" (Entertainment Weekly)--from one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

Rusty Returns To His Beloved Hills, Never To Leave AgainRusty Comes Home Is The Fifth And Final Volume In Puffin'S Complete Collection Of Ruskin Bond'S Ever-Popular Rusty Stories. A Lonely And Sensitive Boy Who Lost His Father Early, Rusty Spent His Childhood In Boarding Schools And With Relatives In Dehra. While Still A Teenager, He Ran Away From His Foster Home And Had Myriad Adventures Before Landing Up In London With The Ambition Of Becoming A Writer. This Book Chronicles Rusty'S Exploits After His Return From London, As He Explores Delhi, Dehra And The Small, Dusty Town Of Shahganj Before Settling Down In Mussoorie, Making His Living As A Writer, And Revelling In The Hills That Have Always Fascinated Him.Rusty Comes Home Contains Some Captivating Stories About Rusty'S Friends And Fleeting Acquaintances, About Human Nature And The Supernatural. Among His Friends In Shahganj Are Ketan, A Victim Of The Partition And Prone To Paralytic Fits; Madhu, A Child Whose Life Is Tragically Cut Short, But Not Before She Leaves An Indelible Impression On Rusty; And Suresh, A Disabled Child With Whom Rusty Strikes Up A Close Bond. In Dehra He Meets Up With His Genial Uncle Bill, Who Makes It His Habit To Poison People With Arsenic; The Incredible Jimmy, A Jinn Who Can Extend His Arms At Will To Infinite Lengths; And Miss Pettibone, The Oldest Resident Of Dehra, Who Enthralls Him With Riveting Stories From The Town'S Past. Then There Is The Unnamed Basket-Selling Girl He Meets By Chance On The Deoli Railway Platform And Can Never Forget; And Binya, A Young And Vivacious Widow, Who Floats Into His Life On The Strains Of A Song.Full Of Charming And Idiosyncratic Characters, These Stories Of Love, Loss And Adventure Will Appeal To Young Readers Of All Ages.

Who is JWC and how was the One Last Wish Foundation created? Discover the tragic story behind a struggle for survival against impossible odds. Follow the interwining story of true love and friendships that compelled JWC to dedicate a life and legacy to helping others in this extraordinary novel of hope. You don't know me, but I know about you.... I can't make you live longer, I can't stop you from hurting. But I can give you one wish, as someone did for me....