A Jewish Woman of Distinction

A Jewish Woman of Distinction
Author: ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2019-12-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1684580013

Zinaida Poliakova (1863–1953) was the eldest daughter of Lazar Solomonovich Poliakov, one of the three brothers known as the Russian Rothschilds. They were moguls who dominated Russian finance and business and built almost a quarter of the railroad lines in Imperial Russia. For more than seventy-five years, Poliakova kept detailed diaries of her world, giving us a rare look into the exclusive world of Jewish elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These rare documents reveal how Jews successfully integrated into Russian aristocratic society through their intimate friendships and patronage of the arts and philanthropy. And they did it all without converting—in fact, while staunchly demonstrating their Jewishness. Poliakova’s life was marked by her dual identity as a Russian and a Jew. She cultivated aristocratic sensibilities and lived an extraordinarily lifestyle, and yet she was limited by the confessional laws of the empire and religious laws that governed her household. She brought her Russian tastes, habits, and sociability to France following her marriage to Reuben Gubbay (the grandson of Sir Albert Abdullah Sassoon). And she had to face the loss of almost all her family members and friends during the Holocaust. Women’s voices are often lost in the sweep of history, and so A Jewish Women of Distinction is an exceptional, much-needed collection. These newly discovered primary sources will change the way we understand the full breadth of the Russian Jewish experience.

Intimate Company: The Confessional Diaries of? A Girl in the Country

Intimate Company: The Confessional Diaries of? A Girl in the Country
Author: Company,
Publisher: Pavilion
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007-05-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781862057685

Sophie is a 25-year-old lawyer, living in London with her boyfriend of 10 years. Everything looks set for her – working for a large corporation, she works hard, earns good money and enjoys cosy nights in with her man, looking forward to the day when they might marry and have children. But all is not as it seems. Returning home from work early to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman, Sophie's life is suddenly turned upside down. Perhaps a spell away from the city where she can reassess her values, expectations and her sexuality would be a good move? She accepts an offer to stay with an old schoolfriend, Genevieve, and soon discovers that her old friend has been making a living as a sex therapist. Genevieve offers her services to Sophie and soon sets her on a rural sexual adventure beyond Sophie's wildest dreams... One of a trio of new erotic titles aimed at a young, sassy and confident readership, 'The Confessional Diaries of a Girl in the Country' brings into play excellent writing and stimulating erotica. Showcasing new talent and embracing firmly every girls right to fantasise and experiment with their sexuality, these books are written by women who know what turns women on (and for that reason alone, men will love them too!).

I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie

I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie
Author: Pamela Des Barres
Publisher: Omnibus Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1787590755

First published in 1987, New York Times bestseller, I’m With The Band has been reprinted throughout the years, all over the world. This is the stylish, exuberant and sweetly innocent tale of one of the most famous groupies of the 1960s and 70s. Beginning with Pamela Des Barres’ early obsession with Elvis, her own Beatlemania madness, and her fierce determination to meet the musicians who rocked her world, I’m With The Band illuminates the glory days of scintillating encounters with musical gods including Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger and Keith Moon. A girl just wanting to have fun, Des Barres immersed herself in the drugs, danger and ecstasy of the freewheeling 1960s. As a member of The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), an all-female group masterminded by Frank Zappa, Des Barres was in the thick of the most revolutionary renaissance in the history of modern popular music. She travelled with Led Zeppelin; lived in sin with Don Johnson; turned down a date with Elvis Presley; and was close friends with Robert Plant, Gram Parsons and Ray Davies. She had affairs with Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Waylon Jennings, Chris Hillman, Noel Redding, and Jim Morrison, among others. A woman in possession of her own destiny, Des Barres blazed a trail for women’s life-writing, standing up for female voices and experience everywhere. From original diaries, told with great warmth, chutzpah and joie de vivre, this is a frank memoir that wears its heart on its sleeve, and recalls one of rock ’n’ roll’s most thrilling eras. This edition contains new material from the author, including her response to the vitriolic shaming of groupies, and a foreword by Roisin O’Connor, rock journalist and music correspondent for the Independent.

Things I Should Have Told My Daughter

Things I Should Have Told My Daughter
Author: Pearl Cleage
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451664699

"An inspiring and revelatory memoir of juggling marriage, motherhood and politics as she worked to become a successful writer and self-fulfilled woman"--Provided by publisher.

A Tale for the Time Being

A Tale for the Time Being
Author: Ruth Ozeki
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 621
Release: 2013-03-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101606258

A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness Finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award “A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.” In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

The Folded Clock

The Folded Clock
Author: Heidi Julavits
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0804171440

A New York Times Notable Book Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they “revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life—now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with her trademark humor, honesty, and searing intelligence.

The Palace Papers

The Palace Papers
Author: Tina Brown
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2022-04-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593138104

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “addictively readable” (The Washington Post) inside story of the British royal family’s battle to overcome the dramas of the Diana years—only to confront new, twenty-first-century crises “Frothy and forthright, a kind of Keeping Up with the Windsors with sprinkles of Keats.”—The New York Times (Notable Book of the Year) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Elle, Town & Country “Never again” became Queen Elizabeth II’s mantra shortly after Princess Diana’s tragic death. More specif­ically, there could never be “another Diana”—a mem­ber of the family whose global popularity upstaged, outshone, and posed an existential threat to the Brit­ish monarchy. Picking up where Tina Brown’s masterful The Diana Chronicles left off, The Palace Papers reveals how the royal family reinvented itself after the trau­matic years when Diana’s blazing celebrity ripped through the House of Windsor like a comet. Brown takes readers on a tour de force journey through the scandals, love affairs, power plays, and betrayals that have buffeted the monarchy over the last twenty-five years. We see the Queen’s stoic re­solve after the passing of Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother, and Prince Philip, her partner for seven decades, and how she triumphs in her Jubilee years even as family troubles rage around her. Brown explores Prince Charles’s determination to make Camilla Parker Bowles his wife, the tension between William and Harry on “different paths,” the ascend­ance of Kate Middleton, the downfall of Prince An­drew, and Harry and Meghan’s stunning decision to step back as senior royals. Despite the fragile monar­chy’s best efforts, “never again” seems fast approaching. Tina Brown has been observing and chronicling the British monarchy for three decades, and her sweeping account is full of powerful revelations, newly reported details, and searing insight gleaned from remarkable access to royal insiders. Stylish, witty, and erudite, The Palace Papers will irrevoca­bly change how the world perceives and under­stands the royal family.

The Inman Diary

The Inman Diary
Author: Arthur Crew Inman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 1748
Release: 1985
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674454453

Between 1919 and his death by suicide in 1963, Arthur Crew Inman wrote what is surely one of the fullest diaries ever kept by any American. Convinced that his bid for immortality required complete candor, he held nothing back. This abridgment of the original 155 volumes is at once autobiography, social chronicle, and an apologia addressed to unborn readers. Into this fascinating record Inman poured memories of a privileged Atlanta childhood, disastrous prep-school years, a nervous collapse in college followed by a bizarre life of self-diagnosed invalidism. Confined to a darkened room in his Boston apartment, he lived vicariously: through newspaper advertisements he hired "talkers" to tell him the stories of their lives, and he wove their strange histories into the diary. Young women in particular fascinated him. He studied their moods, bought them clothes, fondled them, and counseled them on their love affairs. His marriage in 1923 to Evelyn Yates, the heroine of the diary, survived a series of melodramatic episodes. While reflecting on national politics, waifs and revolutions, Inman speaks directly about his fears, compulsions, fantasies, and nightmares, coaxing the reader into intimacy with him. Despite his shocking self-disclosures he emerges as an oddly impressive figure. This compelling work is many things: a case history of a deeply troubled man; the story of a transplanted and self-conscious southerner; a historical overview of Boston illuminated with striking cityscapes; an odd sort of American social history. But chiefly it is, as Inman himself came to see, a gigantic nonfiction novel, a new literary form. As it moves inexorably toward a powerful denouement, The Inman Diary is an addictive narrative.

The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud (The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud)

The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud (The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud)
Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 474
Release: 1996-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393315150

Renowned historian Peter Gay examines the "inner life" of the middle class, depicting a bourgeoisie far more open and far less hypocritical than its critics have maintained. The figures on these pages include Dickens, Flaubert, Delacroix, Millet, Bocklin, George Eliot, William James and more. Photos.