Memoirs Of A Regular Guy

If all sports are really about war, then rugby is a heart-thumping epic of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. In Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man, bestselling author Jay Atkinson describes his thirty-five year odyssey in the sport-from his rough and rowdy days at the University of Florida, through the intrigue of various foreign tours, club championships, and all star selections, up to his current stint with the freewheeling Vandals Rugby Club out of Los Angeles. Jay has played in more than 500 matches, for which he's suffered three broken ribs, a detached retina, a fractured cheekbone and orbital bone, four deadened teeth, and a dislocated ankle. Written in the style of Siegried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Atkinson's book explains why it was all worth it--the sum total of his violent adventures, and the valuable insights he has gained from them.

Fighting the Good Fight is a snapshot of twenty-five years of policing that points to the thin line between courage and crumbling. Patrick exercises his most traumatic memories to end the weight of anxiety and fear that has plagued him throughout most of his adult life. As a former RCMP officer, he witnessed homicidal schizophrenia, sexual predators, domestic violence, drugs, international kidnapping, and a whole other litany of life-threatening situations. Yet, other memories are slipping away. In January of 2019, at sixty-one years old, Patrick was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Although the traumas of his police work remain intact, he has a hard time remembering a conversation or what he had for breakfast. With a remarkable sense of humour and sensitivity to his fellow officers, Patrick takes his readers on a journey through a labyrinth of police work and life in rural eastern Canada as he wrangles with his demons.

Memoirs Of A Regular Guy is the coming of age story of a sexually misguided youth. It chronicles the teenage years of the author; and is full of the lessons and adventures that come along with adolescence. You won’t be able to put this book down!

The fascinating memoir of influential French filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché, one of the industry’s most significant pioneers and a trailblazer for female directors. Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) is a unique pioneer of the motion picture, being not only a female filmmaker but also one of the first, if not the first, to make a narrative film. Her career spanned from 1894, when she became secretary to the legendary Léon Gaumont, through 1920, working in both her native France and the United States. In all, she was responsible for approximately 1,000 films, possibly more than any other director or producer. The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché was first published in 1976, and to a large extent led to her rediscovery after decades of relative obscurity. Guy Blaché writes of her beginnings in the motion picture industry, her direction not only of silent films but also some of the earliest synchronized sound motion pictures, her marriage and journey to the United States, the founding of her own studio in New Jersey, her fame, and the sad journey into obscurity in the 1920s. Her story reveals both the opportunities and the ultimate rejection facing a woman director in the early years of the twentieth century. These first-hand and original memoirs are enhanced with a complete filmography, an epilogue by her daughter Simone, a brief biography of her director husband, Herbert Blaché, a remembrance by feminist actress/writer Madame Olga Petrova, a sampling of contemporary articles on the director, and a new foreword by editor Anthony Slide. Through it all, Alice Guy Blaché’s personal charm, good humor, and modesty shines.

“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

Soon to be a major motion picture, here is the funny, revealing, harrowing memoir of a star journalist and hotshot hockey pro who discovers that he is biochemically changing into a woman. On the surface, Ken Baker seemed a model man. He was a nationally ranked hockey goalie; a Hollywood correspondent for People; a guest-lister at celebrity parties; and girls came on to him. Inside, though, he didn't feel like the man he was supposed to be. Ken found that despite being attracted to women, he had little sex drive and even less of a sex life. To his anguish, he repeatedly found himself unable to perform sexually. Regardless of strenuous workouts, his body remained flabby and soft, earning him the nickname "Pear" from his macho teammates. Physically, matters grew even more bizarre when he discovered that he was lactating. The testosterone-driven culture in which Ken grew up made it agonizingly difficult for him to seek help. But in time he discovered something that lifted years of pain, frustration, and confusion: a brain tumor was causing his body to be flooded with massive amounts of a female hormone, which was disabling his masculinity. Five hours of surgery accomplished what years of therapy, rumination, and denail could not -- and allowed Ken Baker to finally feel -- and function -- like a man. Ken's story is coming to the screen in Fall 2016 in a much-anticipted Netflix feature film, The Late Bloomer, starring Academy Award-winner JK Simmons (Law & Order, Whiplash, Spider-Man) and Jane Lynch (Glee, The 40-Year-Old Virgin). Watch for the TarcherPerigee movie tie-in edition.

A darkly witty, deeply affecting, and finely crafted memoir by the Big Bang Theory andSpeechless star and comedian, John Ross Bowie. From his earliest memories of watching Rhoda with his parents in their tiny Hell’s Kitchen apartment, John knew that he wanted to be an actor. The strange, alternate world of television—where people always cracked the perfect joke, lived in glamorous Upper East Side buildings, and made up immediately after fighting—seemed far better than his own home life, with a mother and father on the brink of divorce and a neighborhood full of crumbling pre-war architecture and not-so-occasional muggings. And yet that other world also seems unattainable. Besides crippling stage fright (which would take him years to overcome) John's father, ever aloof and cynical, has instilled within him the notion that acting is “no job for a man.” His father would impart that while theater, film, and television should be consumed and even debated, to create was no way to make a living or support a family. Putting aside his acting dreams, John stumbles through his twenties. He tries his hand at teaching and other traditional occupations, but nothing feels nearly as fulfilling as playing with his fleetingly on-the-map punk band, Egghead. When he and his bandmates break up, John lands a joyless job copywriting for a consulting agency and slips into a dark depression. He loses weight, begins drinking heavily, and his relationships flounder. But everything changes when John discovers improv (and anti-depressants). As a part of New York’s now-famous Upright Citizens Brigade, John not only explores his passion for acting and comedy—and begins to envision himself doing so professionally—he also meets his future wife and fellow actor, Jamie Denbo. No Job for a Man follows the couple as they relocate to Los Angeles and try to make it in the arts, meeting success and failure, wins and losses, despair and hope along the way. Though his father chronically refuses to acknowledge pride in his adult son’s accomplishments, John comes to realize what being a man truly means.

The book is about me and my interaction with students, faculty, and everyone else. I want to move through my life from birth to the present. The 85 years of life have been eventful, and I am grateful for those who helped me arrive at this point in life. I want to convey the events that guided me through my early years, grade, high school, Army, marriage, college, teaching, and retirement. Each day was a learning experience. The goal was to make teaching more rewarding to the students. Many assignments that are included were not present when I started in 1965. My work during the summers helped me understand the innovations – NC (numerical control), CNC (computer numerical control), EDM (electric discharge machining). That learning helped me convey that knowledge to the students. Included are jobs made by the students that were designed to provide similar experiences found in the machining industry. There are stories about students and teachers that filled my days as a teacher. Lastly, there are assignments a person can try. My only comment is, “don’t do the last two because they are difficult.” That was a favorite comment to get students to work the difficult problems.