Showing results for "William" in Cultural & Regional

To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: He was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in Texas during the waning years of King Cotton.

David Attenborough. Marcus Rashford. Diana Dors. Winston Churchill. Elizabeth David. Bob Geldof. Zaha Hadid. Frank Crichlow. Quentin Crisp. Dusty Springfield. Captain Tom. Who made modern Britain the country it is today? How do we sum up the kind of people we are? What does it mean to be the new Elizabethans? In this wonderfully told history, spanning back to when Queen Elizabeth became queen in 1953, Andrew Marr traces the people who have made Britain the country it is today.

In his late 30s, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands.

When William Kamkwamba was just 14 years old, his family told him that he must leave school and come home to work on the farm - they could no longer afford his fees. This is his story of how he found a way to make a difference, how he brought light to his family and village and hope to his nation.

Many Christians lived in Asia Minor (later Turkey) before the Armenian and Greek genocide by the Muslims at the outset of the twentieth century. The author; Planes, chronicles his father’s true life experience in an effort to make clear the precious freedoms that we have in the United States. This book presents the true story of a Christian boy and his escape from the genocide of Greek and Armenian Christians.

Faleeha Hassan became intimately acquainted with loss and fear while growing up in Najaf, Iraq. Now, in a deeply personal account of her life, she remembers those she has loved and lost.

"Mississippi Hippie: A Life in 49 Pieces" invites you to embark on an extraordinary odyssey through the soul-stirring landscapes of the storied Mississippi Delta and the humming streetscapes of 1970s Memphis. Willy Bearden, a master storyteller, unveils his life's mosaic in a series of poignant and evocative vignettes that resonate with the echoes of a bygone era.

Written and read by best-selling Australian author and much-loved actor William McInnes, this is a story about our love affair with holidays. It's about going away and staying at home. It's about the relaxing times you had as a kid, escapes you have with your children and the stories you hear from your friends. It can be about a romantic sunset, the spare seat at breakfast being taken by an attractive stranger, a miraculous airline upgrade....

In It Takes Two, Cathy Newman rewrites the history books to expose this strange power of two - the reason Holmes and Watson need to come as a pair, and Apple could not have been started by Steve Jobs alone. Bringing together an extraordinary range of stories from around the world, Newman shows how double acts have relied on each other, how minds have married to usher in miraculous discoveries and how those we think of as lone geniuses often did not work solo.

As the US occupation of Iraq rages, novelist Mortada Gzar, a student at the University of Baghdad, has a chance encounter with Morise, an African American soldier. It’s love at first sight, a threat to them both, and a moment of self-discovery. Challenged by society’s rejection and Morise’s return to the US, Mortada takes to the page to understand himself. In his affecting memoir, Mortada interweaves tales of his childhood work as a scrap-metal collector in a war zone and the indignities faced by openly gay artists in Iraq with his impossible love story and journey to the US.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres....

I was born a BASTARD of southwest Philadelphia and raised in a rundown row house in one of America's most notorious GHETTOS, Camden, New Jersey. My upbringing was marked by a resilient mother, an inconsistent father, and the harsh realities of a city that claimed several of my immediate family member's lives, the youngest among them being a victim of police violence. I found myself embodying the archetype of an American stereotype.

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told, 'the best on the planet'?

Despite everything that was against me: my past, my record, all the terrible things I've done and the ones that were done to me, I overcame them all. I stayed out of prison. Today I am a successful businessman, a husband, a father, and a person who is dedicated to helping those who, like me, are singled out and marginalized by society. This is not a fairy tale; it is a true story of how I was able to overcome all barriers and break all the statistics that I had against me. I gave myself the opportunity, now it's your turn

William Wallace started out as a humble knight, but he died a war hero. He gave up everything in his fight for Scottish freedom, including his life. When captured, Wallace was hung, drawn, and quartered by the English king for crimes against the crown. Though he was memorialized in the 1995 film Braveheart, this book tells how much of what we associate with Wallace is more legend than fact. Still, the spirit of the great Scotsman lives on in the hearts and minds of his compatriots today.

My Two Centuries in Africa is a humorous, affectionate, intimate book about Africa. It’s a personal memoir about how a guy from Indiana accidentally spent almost 40 years in Africa and lived to tell about it. (Book One covers the 20th century, from 1980-2000 when the author lived and worked in North and West Africa).

As star players for the 1955 World Champion Brooklyn Dodgers, and prior to that as the first black players to be candidates to break professional baseball's color barrier, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella would seem to be natural allies. But the two men were divided by a rivalry going far beyond the personality differences and petty jealousies of competitive teammates. Behind the bitterness were deep and differing beliefs about the fight for civil rights.

This book contains autobiographies by 12 individuals of Korean descent. However, their background experiences are vastly different. The editor of the book, Ariel Raimundo Choi, was born in Argentina and is still a citizen of Argentina; therefore, he considers himself a Hispanic-Korean-American. Ye One Chung grew up most of her life in Israel, so she considers Israel as her home. She writes a part of her autobiography in modern Hebrew, a language Ye One Chung is fluent at.

Growing in a small Texas town in the midst of the Great Depression, pummeled by the mighty dust storms so devastating that the region was known as the “Dust Bowl”, and coping with a diagnosis of tuberculosis at age 15, Jimmy Ray Lewis and his family experienced hardship, loss, and community rejection. This audiobook is the story of forgiveness, family strength, and faith that life would be better if they could just “keep on keeping on”.

William McInnes, one of Australia's best-loved entertainers and authors, takes a look at the Aussie obsession with sports and pop culture. A chance encounter in an auction house is the jumping-off point for William's inimitable take on our sport-obsessed nation, Australian popular culture and the artefacts and memorabilia that make us both cringe with recognition and laugh with warm affection. His trademark humour and anecdotes litter this collection, making it a true delight.