Hello Darkness My Old Friend

It’s a bitterly cold February in 1961, and Sandy Greenberg lies in a hospital bed in Detroit, newly blind. A junior at Columbia University from a Jewish family that struggled to stay above the poverty line, Sandy had just started to see the world open up to him. Now, instead of his plans for a bright future—Harvard Law and politics—Sandy faces a new reality, one defined by a cane or companion dog, menial work, and a cautious path through life. But that’s not how this story ends. In the depth of his new darkness, Sandy faces a choice—play it “safe” by staying in his native Buffalo or return to Columbia to pursue his dreams. With the loving devotion of his girlfriend (and now wife) Sue and the selflessness of best friends Art Garfunkel and Jerry Speyer, Sandy endures unimaginable adversity while forging a life of exceptional achievement. From his time in the White House working for President Lyndon B. Johnson to his graduate studies at Harvard and Oxford under luminaries such as Archibald Cox, Sir Arthur Goodhart, and Samuel Huntington, and through the guidance of his invaluable mentor David Rockefeller, Sandy fills his life and the lives of those around him with a radiant light of philanthropy, entrepreneurship, art, and innovation.

The "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Beautiful Lies" delivers a thriller about broken trust that explores our faith in those we rely on--and how that faith can sustain or shatter us.

This innovative, self-help book proposes that anger is an omnipresent, albeit unpleasant, part of every person's life, every single day. Our happiness and our success, professional, personal, and physical, is directly dependent on our ability to handle it. Using clinical vignettes as well as familiar examples from the front page and the silver screen, all aspects of anger, from sibling rivalry to mob violence, are analyzed and understood. Constructive pragmatic approaches are suggested for every conceivable frustration or confrontation. The book soothes as it illuminates. With hundreds of footnotes it is an encyclopedic overview of a vital subject.

"Poetic musings on a life well-lived—one that is still moving forward, always creating, always luminous. This isn't your typical autobiography. Garfunkel's history is told in flowing prose, bounding from present to past, far from a linear rags-to-riches story." —Bookreporter "It's hard to imagine any single word that would accurately describe this book . . . an entertaining volume that's more fun to read than a conventional memoir might have been." —The Wall Street Journal "A charming book of prose and poetry printed in a digitalized version of his handwriting . . . witty, candid, and wildly imaginative . . . A highly intelligent man trying to make sense of his extraordinary life." —Associated Press From the golden-haired, curly-headed half of Simon & Garfunkel, a memoir (of sorts)—moving, lyrical impressions, interspersed throughout a narrative, punctuated by poetry, musings, lists of resonant books loved and admired, revealing a life and the making of a musician, that show us, as well, the evolution of a man, a portrait of a life-long friendship and of a collaboration that became the most successful singing duo in the roiling age that embraced, and was defined by, their pathfinding folk-rock music. In What Is It All but Luminous, Art Garfunkel writes about growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s (son of a traveling salesman, listening as his father played Enrico Caruso records), a middle-class Jewish boy, living in a redbrick semi-attached house on Jewel Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens. He writes of meeting Paul Simon, the kid who made Art laugh (they met at their graduation play, Alice in Wonderland; Paul was the White Rabbit; Art, the Cheshire Cat). Of their being twelve at the birth of rock’n’roll (“it was rhythm and blues. It was black. I was captured and so was Paul”), of a demo of their song, Hey Schoolgirl for seven dollars and the actual record (with Paul’s father on bass) going to #40 on the charts. He writes about their becoming Simon & Garfunkel, ruling the pop charts from the age of sixteen, about not being a natural performer but more a thinker, an underground man. He writes of the hit songs; touring; about being an actor working with directors Mike Nichols (“the greatest of them all”), about choosing music over a PhD in mathematics. And he writes about his long-unfolding split with Paul, and how and why it evolved, and after; learning to perform on his own . . . and about being a husband, a father and much more.

The host of a late night, call-in radio show, Paris Gibson joins with police psychologist Dean Malloy to identify a mysterious caller known only as "Valentino" before he kills a woman whom he feels has wronged him

It's now a year exactly since my urologist told me I had an aggressive cancer that was incurable. I was rushed into hospital and thus began a year of chemotherapy, radiation and all the ups and downs of a sickness that arrived in my life with the noise and terror of an old fashioned train. During that time I wrote about my experience on my Iphone, on Facebook, and I received in return an explosion of aroha on that most cynical of mediums - the internet. There was advice, commentary, encouragement, accompaniment. The posts became the basis for Hello Darkness. I made something out of nothing if near-death experiences can be said to be nothing. I learnt a lot. I am a different ...

A black comedy and high-school noir from a critically acclaimed writer"A darkly comic and original mystery novel filled with Raymond Chandleresque noir dialogue" - The Telegraph Someone is on a killing spree - slaughtering the school pets with a cold-blooded savagery. The number-one suspect: Johnny Middleton. Johnny's had problems in the past, but they're behind him now. So what if he still sees the world a little differently? He's not crazy and he's not a killer. And he's going to prove it.

"East of Mecca is a harrowing story of love and betrayal, a family's tragic undoing, the transcendant power of friendship, and the ultimate price of oppression"--Back cover.