Knock Wood

Candice Bergen's bestselling 1984 memoir: an “engaging, intelligent, and wittily self-deprecating autobiography” (The New York Times). Candice Bergen was born into the heady Hollywood of the 1950s, where “celebrity offspring” were celebrities unto themselves. And because she was the daughter of Edgar Bergen, vaudeville and radio's greatest dignitary/comedian, her “sibling” was Charlie McCarthy, the impudent dummy beloved of millions. Bergen—much as he loved his daughter—was a man who “kept his emotions pressed and neatly hung,” and was more comfortable speaking to—and through—his brainchild who never had to grow up and leave the paradise that was childhood. Knock Wood is a book all about growing up—about the comedy of expectations that ruled Candice Bergen's early life, about the ironies that attended her exotic rites of passage. She stepped out into a world that offered her a wealth of options: adolescence in Swiss boarding schools; at nineteen, costarring opposite Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles; quick entry into the profession of photojournalism; automatic acceptance among the esteemed company of the moment—be it the international jet set, Bel Air in the 1960s, or the world that was radical politics in the 1970s. But always she carried the conviction that her gifts were untested, her luck unearned. Told with wit, self-deprecation, and a rare degree of courage, Knock Wood is the extraordinary record of Candice Bergen's coming of age. It is at once the moving fable of the love between a father and a daughter, of a woman's triumph over self-doubt, and a dazzling journal of America's life and times over the past four decades.

Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, author of the bestseller Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities, was born on Friday the thirteenth, a fact that he discovered long after he had become one of the world’s pre-eminent statisticians. Had he been living ignorantly and innocently under an unlucky cloud for all those years? Or is thirteen just another number? As a scientist and a man of reason, Rosenthal has long considered the value of luck, good and bad, seeking to measure chance and hope in formulas scratched out on chalkboards. In Knock on Wood, with great humour and irreverence, Rosenthal divines the world of luck, fate and chance, putting his considerable scientific acumen to the test in deducing whether luck is real or the mere stuff of superstition.

Scott Prudham investigates a region that has in recent years seen more environmental conflict than perhaps anywhere else in the country--the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Prudham employs a political economic approach to explain the social and economic conflicts arising from the timber industry's presence in the region. As well, he provides a thorough accounting of the timber industry itself, tracing its motivations, practices, and labor relations.

Freeman Douglas Knockwood is a highly respected Elder in Mi’kmaw Territory and one of Canada’s premier addictions recovery counsellors. The story of his life is one of unimaginable colonial trauma, recovery and hope. At age 6, Knockwood was placed in the Shubenacadie Residential School, where he remained for a year and a half. Like hundreds of other Mi’kmaw and Maliseet children, he suffered horrible abuse. By the time he reached his twenties, he was an alcoholic. He contracted tuberculosis in the 1940s, had one lung and several ribs removed. Having hit rock bottom, Knockwood gained sobriety in his thirties through Alcoholics Anonymous. He went on to become a much sought after drug and alcohol rehabilitation counsellor in Canada. Many of Doug’s initiatives have been implemented across Canada and used by thousands of people, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Looking back now, says Doug, “I realize I wasn’t only helping them. They were helping me to gather strength in my presentations, in feeding them the knowledge I received, the same as it was fed to me. That helped me to gain confidence in myself; doing all these things that I didn’t know I could yet do”. This book is an in-depth look at Doug Knockwood’s life that also casts a wide and critical glance at the forces that worked to undermine his existence and the indomitable spirit of a man who recovered from, yet still struggles to overcome, those forces.

The Indian Residential School in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was established by the Canadian government in 1929 to provide residential education to orphan, destitute, neglected, and other Mi'kmaw Indian children aged 7-16. Since many Indian parents were poor and unable to provide for their children, they felt the school was a chance for their children to have adequate clothing and food as well as an education. The parents did not understand that when they signed school registration papers, they were transferring guardianship of their children to the school principal. The school's staff of 10 nuns and a priest (principal) provided room and board and education to an annual population of about 200 until the school closed in 1967. The 5-year-old author and her brother and sister were sent to the school in 1936. She was a resident at the school for 11 years. This book relates her memories, and other students' memories, of their life at the school: physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by the nuns and priest; inadequate food and clothing; lack of care when ill or injured; enforced labor in the kitchen, laundry, barn, and fields; and beatings for speaking their native language. Even though some children were allowed to go home for summer vacation and parents were allowed to visit on Sunday, no student was allowed to permanently leave the school. The school's suppression of the children's Indian language, culture, and heritage caused severe social and personal adjustment problems, which are related through quotations from former students. Rumored to have been built on an old Indian burial ground, and haunted, the remnants of the school mysteriously burned down in 1986. Government officials and the Catholic church apologized to Native people for treatment at the school in 1991. Chapters are: "Origins" (nonformal Native education and child rearing); "Everyday Life at the School"; "Work and Play"; "Rewards and Punishments"; "Ghosts and Hauntings"; "Resistance"; "The End of the School"; "The Official Story"; and "Out of the Depths." Includes photographs. (SAS) -- from ERIC dbase.

A collection of seventeen original poems about superstitions, including walking under a ladder, breaking a mirror, and knocking on wood.

Known for the classics "Knock on Wood," "634-5789," "Raise Your Hand," "Big Bird," and "I've Never Found a Girl (To Love Me Like You Do)," among others, Eddie Floyd's career as a soul legend spans over sixty years. His professional singing career began in Detroit in the 1950s as a founding member of the Falcons, considered "The First Soul Group." A solo artist and songwriter for Memphis's famed Stax Records from 1966 until 1975, Floyd has subsequently been the singer for the Blues Brothers Band and for Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings, while continuing to perform and record solo. In Knock! Knock! Knock! On Wood, Floyd recounts how a three-year stint in an Alabama reform school shaped his young life; recalls the early years of R&B in Detroit alongside future Motown and Stax legends; discusses the songwriting sessions with Steve Cropper and Booker T. Jones that produced his biggest hits; addresses his complicated life-long relationship with the often-unpredictable Wilson Pickett; shares his memories of friend Otis Redding; reveals his unlikely involvement in the rise of southern rock darlings Lynyrd Skynyrd; and offers an insider perspective on the tragic downfall of Stax Records. With input from Bruce Springsteen, Bill Wyman, Paul Young, William Bell, Steve Cropper, and others, Knock! Knock! Knock! On Wood captures Eddie's tireless work ethic and warm personality for an engrossing first-hand account of one of the last true soul survivors.