Some Came Running

Some Came Running
Author: James Jones
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 1282
Release: 2014-11-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 145321576X

James Jones’s saga of life in the American Midwest, newly revised five decades after it was first published and including a new foreword by his daughter, Kaylie Jones After the blockbuster international success of From Here to Eternity, James Jones retreated from public life, making his home at the Handy Writers’ Colony in Illinois. His goal was to write something larger than a war novel, and the result, six years in the making, was Some Came Running, a stirring portrait of small-town life in the American Midwest at a time when our country and its people were striving to find their place in the new postwar world. Five decades later, it has been revised and reedited under the direction of the Jones estate to allow for a leaner, tighter read. The result is the masterpiece Jones intended: a tale whose brutal honesty is as shocking now as on the day it was first published. This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.

From Here to Eternity

From Here to Eternity
Author: James Jones
Publisher:
Total Pages: 984
Release: 1998
Genre: Soldiers
ISBN: 9780340717530

An epic of World War II, this novel reflects the exciting, tumultuous and brutal world inhabited by soldiers and the women they love. It portrays the consuming conflicts of a generation set afire by the passions and savagery of war.

The Film That Changed My Life

The Film That Changed My Life
Author: Robert K. Elder
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1569768285

The movie that inspired filmmakers to direct is like the atomic bomb that went off before their eyes. The Film That Changed My Life captures that epiphany. It explores 30 directors' love of a film they saw at a particularly formative moment, how it influenced their own works, and how it made them think differently. Rebel Without a Cause inspired John Woo to comb his hair and talk like James Dean. For Richard Linklater, “something was simmering in me, but Raging Bull brought it to a boil.” Apocalypse Now inspired Danny Boyle to make larger-than-life films. A single line from The Wizard of Oz--“Who could ever have thought a good little girl like you could destroy all my beautiful wickedness?”--had a direct impact on John Waters. “That line inspired my life,” Waters says. “I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.” In this volume, directors as diverse as John Woo, Peter Bogdanovich, Michel Gondry, and Kevin Smith examine classic movies that inspired them to tell stories. Here are 30 inspired and inspiring discussions of classic films that shaped the careers of today's directors and, in turn, cinema history.

Who the Hell's in It?

Who the Hell's in It?
Author: Peter Bogdanovich
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2005
Genre: Motion picture actors and actresses
ISBN: 9780571224319

From Lillian Gish to Jack Lemmon, Bogdanovich captures brilliantly--in their own words and in his--the work and styles of 26 fascinating Hollywood iconic actors and actresses. 120 photos in text.

My Lucky Stars

My Lucky Stars
Author: Shirley Maclaine
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 430
Release: 1996-11-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0553572334

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This book is like nothing you’ve read before about the world of movies—written by a movie star.”—Liz Smith An Academy Award-winning actress and the internationally bestselling author of Out on a Limb delivers her touching, warm, and headline-making memoir. In My Lucky Stars Shirley MacLaine talks candidly and personally about her four decades in Hollywood, especially about the men and women—her “lucky stars”—who touched and challenged her life. “[Maclaine is] an engaging storyteller. . . . Breezy and entertaining.”—The New York Times Book Review

The Best Film You've Never Seen

The Best Film You've Never Seen
Author: Robert K. Elder
Publisher: Zephyr Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1569768382

Thirty-five directors reveal which overlooked or critically savaged films they believe deserve a larger audience while offering advice on how to watch each film.

I Came As a Shadow

I Came As a Shadow
Author: John Thompson
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1250619343

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK The long-awaited autobiography from Georgetown University’s legendary coach, whose life on and off the basketball court threw America’s unresolved struggle with racial justice into sharp relief. John Thompson was never just a basketball coach and I Came As A Shadow is categorically not just a basketball autobiography. After five decades at the center of race and sports in America, Thompson—the iconic NCAA champion, Black activist, and educator—was ready to make the private public at last, and he completed this autobiography shortly before his death in the historically tumultuous summer of 2020. Chockful of stories and moving beyond mere stats (three Final Fours, four-time national coach of the year, seven Big East championships, 97 percent graduation rate), Thompson’s book drives us through his childhood under Jim Crow segregation to our current moment of racial reckoning. We experience riding shotgun with Celtics icon Red Auerbach and coaching NBA Hall of Famers like Patrick Ewing and Allen Iverson. What were the origins of the the phrase “Hoya Paranoia”? You’ll see. And parting his veil of secrecy, Thompson brings us into his negotiation with a D.C. drug kingpin in his players’ orbit in the 1980s, as well as behind the scenes of his years on the Nike board. Thompson’s mother was a teacher who had to clean houses because of racism in the nation's capital. His father could not read or write. Their son grew up to be a man with his own larger-than-life statue in a building that bears his family’s name on a campus once kept afloat by the selling of 272 enslaved Black people. This is a great American story, and John Thompson’s experience sheds light on many of the issues roiling our nation. In these pages, he proves himself to be the elder statesman whose final words college basketball and the country need to hear. I Came As A Shadow is not a swan song, but a bullhorn blast from one of America’s most prominent sons.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2009-08-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307373088

From the best-selling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, a rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running, and the integral impact both have made on his life. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Haruki Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and includes settings ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs and the experience, after the age of fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.

Running Away to Home

Running Away to Home
Author: Jennifer Wilson
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2011-10-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429989084

A middle class, Midwestern family in search of meaning uproot themselves and move to their ancestral village in Croatia. "We can look at this in two ways," Jim wrote, always the pragmatist. "We can panic and scrap the whole idea. Or we can take this as a sign. They're saying the economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Maybe this is the kick in the pants we needed to do something completely different. There will always be an excuse not to go..." And that, friends, is how a typically sane middle-aged mother decided to drag her family back to a forlorn mountain village in the backwoods of Croatia. So begins author Jennifer Wilson's journey in Running Away to Home. Jen, her architect husband, Jim, and their two children had been living the typical soccer- and ballet-practice life in the most Middle American of places: Des Moines, Iowa. They overindulged themselves and their kids, and as a family they were losing one another in the rush of work, school, and activities. One day, Jen and her husband looked at each other–both holding their Starbucks coffee as they headed out to their SUV in the mall parking lot, while the kids complained about the inferiority of the toys they just got–and asked themselves: "Is this the American dream? Because if it is, it sort of sucks." Jim and Jen had always dreamed of taking a family sabbatical in another country, so when they lost half their savings in the stock-market crash, it seemed like just a crazy enough time to do it. High on wanderlust, they left the troubled landscape of contemporary America for the Croatian mountain village of Mrkopalj, the land of Jennifer's ancestors. It was a village that seemed hermetically sealed for the last one hundred years, with a population of eight hundred (mostly drunken) residents and a herd of sheep milling around the post office. For several months they lived like locals, from milking the neighbor's cows to eating roasted pig on a spit to desperately seeking the village recipe for bootleg liquor. As the Wilson-Hoff family struggled to stay sane (and warm), what they found was much deeper and bigger than themselves.

The Thin Red Line

The Thin Red Line
Author: James Jones
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 717
Release: 2011-12-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453215670

With “shattering prose,” the New York Times–bestselling author of From Here to Eternity captures the intense combat in the battle of Guadalcanal (San Francisco Chronicle). In August of 1942 the first American marines charged Guadalcanal, igniting a six-month battle for two thousand square miles of jungle and sand. In that gruesome stretch sixty thousand Americans made the jump from boat to beach, and one in nine did not return. James Jones fought in that battle, and The Thin Red Line is his haunting portrait of men and war. The soldiers of C-for-Charlie Company are not cast from the heroic mold. The unit’s captain is too intelligent and sensitive for the job, his first sergeant is half mad, and the enlisted men begin the campaign gripped by cowardice. Jones’s moving portrayal of the Pacific combat experience stands among the great literature of World War II. This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.