Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Alexandra Fuller

Nonfiction

When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, heady scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy. “Smell that,” she whispered, “that’s home.” Vanessa was running up and down the deck, unaccountably wild for a child usually so placid. Intoxicated already. I took in a faceful of African air and fell instantly into a fever. In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight , Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with visceral authenticity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time. From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller–known to friends and family as Bobo–grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war, and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself at their African life and its rugged farm work with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything else. Though she loved her children, she was no hand-holder and had little tolerance for neediness. She nurtured her daughters in other ways: She taught them, by example, to be resilient and self-sufficient, to have strong wills and strong opinions, and to embrace life wholeheartedly, despite and because of difficult circumstances. And she instilled in Bobo, particularly, a love of reading and of storytelling that proved to be her salvation. A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. But Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is more than a survivor’s story. It is the story of one woman’s unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt.
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Quiet Until the Thaw

Quiet Until the Thaw

Alexandra Fuller

Nonfiction

The debut novel from the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Leaving Before the Rains Come. Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota. Two Native American cousins, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson, though bound by blood and by land, find themselves at odds as they grapple with the implications of their shared heritage. When escalating anger toward the injustices, historical and current, inflicted upon the Lakota people by the federal government leads to tribal divisions and infighting, the cousins go in separate directions: Rick chooses the path of peace; You Choose, violence. Years pass, and as You Choose serves time in prison, Rick finds himself raising twin baby boys orphaned at birth in his meadow. As the twins mature from infants to young men, Rick immerses the boys in their ancestry, telling wonderful and terrible tales of how the whole world came to be and affirming their place in the universe as...
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Where the Bodies Were Buried

Where the Bodies Were Buried

T. J. English

Nonfiction / Crime / History

New York Times bestselling author T. J. English, the acclaimed master chronicler of the Irish Mob in America, offers a front-row seat at the trial of one of the most notorious gangsters of all—Whitey Bulger—and pulls back the veil to expose a breathtaking history of corruption and malfeasanceWhitey Bulger was, following the death of Osama bin Laden, the number-one fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list; he remained at large for sixteen years. One of the most prominent mobsters in Boston's criminal underworld from the 1970s until his disappearance in 1995, Bulger was sometimes romanticized as a Robin Hood–esque thief and protector who looked out for his South Boston neighborhood.But the truth was much more complicated—and infinitely more sordid—as his trial on racketeering charges revealed in alarming detail. Throughout the era in which Bulger was a crime boss, he was also a Top Echelon Informant (TE) for the FBI, supposedly...
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Archangel (Mass Market Paperback)

Archangel (Mass Market Paperback)

Robert Harris

Historical Fiction / Nonfiction / Mystery & Thrillers

SUMMARY: Archangel is a remarkably literate novel--and simultaneously a gripping thriller--that explores the lingering presence of Stalin amidst the corruption of modern-day Russia. Robert Harris (whose previous works include Enigma and Fatherland) elevates his tale by choosing a narrator with an outsider's perspective but an insider's knowledge of Soviet history: Fluke Kelso, a middle-aged scholar of Soviet Communism with a special interest in the dark secrets of Joseph Stalin. For years, rumors have circulated about a notebook that the aging dictator kept in his final years. In a chance encounter in Moscow, Kelso meets Papu Rapava, a former NKVD guard who claims that he was at Stalin's deathbed and says that he assisted Politburo member Beria in hiding the black oilskin notebook just as Stalin was passing. Before Kelso can get more details, Rapava disappears, but the scholar is energized by the evidence Rapava has provided. As Kelso begins to pursue his historical prize, however, his investigation ensnares him in a living web of Stalinist terror and murder. It soon becomes clear that the notebook is the key to a doorway hiding many secrets, old and new. Harris's understanding of Soviet and modern Russian is impressive. The novel rests on a seamless blend of fact and fiction that places real figures from Soviet history alongside Kelso and his fictional colleagues. Especially disturbing are the transcripts from interrogations and the excerpt from Kelso's lectures on Stalin; the documents provide chilling evidence to support Kelso's claim: "There can now be no doubt that it is Stalin rather than Hitler who is the most alarming figure of the twentieth century." --Patrick O'Kelley
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Enchanted Dawn

Enchanted Dawn

Anne Hampson

Romance / Mystery & Thrillers / Nonfiction

Tragedy had hit Teri Manders and her brother Jon at the same time, when Jon's wife ran away with Teri's fiance. So the unexpected offer to Jon of a farm in the Transvaal couldn't have come at a better moment. It would give Jon a chance to build a new life for himself and his little daughter, while Teri could look after them both and forget about men for a long, long time. Brand Royce must be avoided from now on, Teri decided firmly. He was becoming far more authoritative. Besides, she had changed in some indefinable way, so that she found it difficult to ignore Brand's compelling personality. "All men aren't the same, Teri," he said. "You must get that idea out of your mind." But Teri wasn't sure she was really ready to trust a man again.
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Not Meeting Mr Right

Not Meeting Mr Right

Anita Heiss

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction / Children's Books

Alice Aigner is successful, independent and a confirmed serial dater - but at her ten-year school reunion she has a sudden change of heart. Bored rigid by her married, mortgaged and motherly former classmates, Alice decides to prove that a woman can have it all: a man, marriage, career, kids and a mind of her own. She sets herself a goal: meet the perfect man and marry him before her thirtieth birthday, just under two years away. Together with her best friends Dannie, Liza and Peta, Alice draws up a ten-point plan. Then, with a little help from her mum, her dad, her brothers, her colleagues and her neighbour across the hall, she sets out to find Mr Right. Unfortunately for Alice, it's not quite as easy as she imagines ... Who could not fall in love with our Koori heroine as she dates (among others): Renan, whose career goal is to be the world's best moonwalker and male hula dancer; Tufu the commitment-phobic Samoan football player; scary Simon the one-night stand; and Paul -...
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Hot Countries

Hot Countries

Alec Waugh

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction / Biographies & Memoirs

This discursive and absorbing travel-book offers, as the author says in his new Foreword, "a picture of a way of living that exists no longer." Hot Countries tells of a series of journeys in the Far East, the West Indies and the South Sea Islands when he was a young and light-hearted novelist seeking colour, romance and adven-ture, and when foreign travel was not hedged by to-day's restrictions. Tahiti provides the colour, with its idyllic scenery and its lovely girls joyously offering to keep house for visiting bachelors; Martinique recalls the devastating eruption of Mont Pelee; in Siam (now called Thailand) he amusingly describes the worship of a baby white elephant, and the problem of the white man's relations with brown women; in Ceylon occurs a ludicrous episode of native misunderstanding of the Westerner. After discussing " The Englishman in the Tropics " Mr. Waugh glances at the New Hebrides and then transports us to the Black Republic of Haiti (describing the...
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Avoiding Mr Right

Avoiding Mr Right

Anita Heiss

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction / Children's Books

'So it's final then, you're not taking James to Melbourne?' Liza asked. 'Are you kidding? Taking a man to Melbourne would be like taking a sandwich to a smorgasbord.' Peta Tully has found her Mr Right - the only trouble is, she's not sure she's ready to settle down. Not just yet, anyway - so when she's offered a twelve-month contract interstate which just might win her the job of her dreams, she puts her Sydney life on hold, packs her bags and jumps on a plane, leaving her doting boyfriend behind. Peta takes a voluntary vow of celibacy, but sticking to it proves harder than she imagines ... This is Anita Heiss's second book about Peta, Alice, Liza and Dannie, four deadly, desirable and dynamic thirty-something chicks from Sydney's eastern beaches.
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The Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus Affair

Piers Paul Read

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction / Biographies & Memoirs

July 20, 1894. The German Military Attache in Paris. Colonel Maximillien von Schwarzkoppen received a visit from a seedy-looking middle-aged Frenchman who would not give his name. He told Schwarzkoppen that he was a French army officer serving on the General Staff; that he was in desperate need of money; and was therefore prepared to sell military secrets to the Germans.Captain Alfred Dreyfus, then aged 35, was a high-flying career artillery officer. Shy, reserved, sometimes awkward, but intelligent and ambitious, Dreyfus had everything he might have hoped for: a wife, two enchanting children, plenty of money and a post on the General Staff. However, Dreyfus' rise in the army had not made him friends. Many of them came from the impoverished Catholic aristocracy and disliked Dreyfus because he was rich, bourgeois and, above all, a Jew.On October 13, Captain Dreyfus was summoned by the General de Boisdeffre to the Ministry of War. Despite minimal evidence against...
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A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife

A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife

Daniel Quinn

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

The guide of choice for anyone who plans to die someday--are YOU ready for the AFTERLIFE?To find out, take this simple quiz:1. Like Earth, the Afterlife has celebrities, outcasts, deadheads, losers, and busybodies. TrueFalse2. Is there an Afterlife after the Afterlife? Yes No3. When you first arrive on "the Other Side," you will be given: a) a set of wings b) a toaster c) a copy of A Newcomer's Guide to the AfterlifeDon't worry if you're not sure how to respond. A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife has answers to these questions and more--and if you're lucky, some of them may turn out to be right!An irreverent, one-of-a-kind compendium from the award-winning author of Ishmael, A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife can be read as a parable, an allegory, a work of fiction--or exactly what it claims to be: a helpful handbook for the recently deceased. It is filled with...
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