Soaring, My Improbable Life

Soaring, My Improbable Life
Author: Major Alphonso B Jones
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-02-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781647193478

Soaring, My Improbable Life is the inspiring story of a poor, African American boy growing up in the Great Depression, who dreams of traveling the world. With audacity, focus, and resilience, he succeeds in getting a college education, finding love, journeying to distant lands, becoming a decorated war hero, and raising three successful children. Al's story provides valuable insights for dreamers everywhere determined to make their own dreams come true against the odds.

Improbable Scholars

Improbable Scholars
Author: David L. Kirp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2015
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0199391092

In Improbable Scholars, David L. Kirp challenges the conventional wisdom about public schools and education reform in America through an in-depth look at Union City, New Jersey's high-performing urban school district. In this compelling study, Kirp reveals Union's city's revolutionary secret: running an exemplary school system doesn't demand heroics, just hard and steady work.

North Star Over My Shoulder

North Star Over My Shoulder
Author: Bob Buck
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2005-01-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780743262309

Buck, the embodiment of commercial aviation in America, recounts his thrilling life in flight in this exhilarating volume, hailed as "absolutely brilliant" by the former director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

The Last Folk Hero

The Last Folk Hero
Author: Jeff Pearlman
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 774
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0358438713

New York Times Bestseller • The ultimate gift for sports lovers By the author of Showtime—the source for HBO’s Winning Time—the definitive biography of mythic multi-sport star Bo Jackson. “A legendary tome on a legendary athlete." —Chris Herring, author of Blood in the Garden From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character—and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat. He became the first person to simultaneously star in two major professional sports, and overtook Michael Jordan as America’s most recognizable pitchman. He was on our televisions, in our magazines, plastered across billboards. He was half man, half myth. Then, almost overnight, he was gone. He was Bo Jackson. Drawing on an astonishing 720 original interviews, New York Times bestselling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman captures as never before the elusive truth about Jackson, Auburn University’s transcendent Heisman Trophy winner, superstar of both the NFL and Major League Baseball and ubiquitous “Bo Knows” Nike pitchman. Did Bo really jump over a parked Volkswagen? (Yes.) Did he actually run a 4.13 40? (Yes.) During the 1991 flight that nearly killed every member of the Chicago White Sox, was he in the cockpit trying to help? (Oddly, yes. Or no. Or … maybe.) Bo Jackson isn’t Jim Thorpe. He’s not Deion Sanders, either. No, Bo Jackson is Paul Bunyan. The Last Folk Hero is the true tale of Bo Jackson that only “master storyteller” (NPR.org) Jeff Pearlman could tell.

Yes

Yes
Author: Daniel Bryan
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2015-07-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 125006788X

One of the most popular WWE champions tells his behind-the-scenes story for the first time.

An Improbable Life

An Improbable Life
Author: Robert Craft
Publisher:
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"It begins with the author's childhood in Kingston, New York, his time in the New York Military Academy prep school in Cornwall-on-Hudson, and his entry into Juilliard, cut short by Army service. Soon Craft's musical activities lead him into his relationship with Stravinsky in Hollywood, New York, and elsewhere, all richly documented by Stravinsky's letters in the "Dear Bobsky" section of the book.".

Rifke

Rifke
Author: Rosalie Sharp
Publisher: ECW Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1550227750

In this memoir, the author casts a wry and self-deprecating look back on her childhood, with anecdotes about the chance events and comic ironies that make up a life. Rifke (Rosalie Wise Sharp) grew up in North Toronto, which felt to her like a foreign place because there were no other Jewish families there in the late 1930s. Yiddish was spoken in her household, and the food, dress, and customs of Ozarow—the Polish shtetl (small Jewish town) from which her parents emigrated—were all maintained. Rifke's peers took lessons in tap dancing, ice skating, the piano, and the flute—activities that didn't translate into the Yiddish vocabulary, where only hard work, no-nonsense, and book learning were permitted. Rifke secretly decided to pass as a gentile, joining a bible class and the Christmas choir, and she was guilty about her pursuit of these activities during the war, when her mother was frantic with fear that their family in Poland was being slaughtered by the Nazis. In high school, Rifke's life changed: it was there that she met and married her soul mate Isadore, who worked in the construction business, much to her parents' disappointment. Prosperity, took time however, and Isadore's audacious dream to build a world-class hotel chain, The Four Seasons, came to pass.

The Boy Who Loved Math

The Boy Who Loved Math
Author: Deborah Heiligman
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2013-06-25
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 146683952X

Most people think of mathematicians as solitary, working away in isolation. And, it's true, many of them do. But Paul Erdos never followed the usual path. At the age of four, he could ask you when you were born and then calculate the number of seconds you had been alive in his head. But he didn't learn to butter his own bread until he turned twenty. Instead, he traveled around the world, from one mathematician to the next, collaborating on an astonishing number of publications. With a simple, lyrical text and richly layered illustrations, this is a beautiful introduction to the world of math and a fascinating look at the unique character traits that made "Uncle Paul" a great man. The Boy Who Loved Math by Deborah Heiligman is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013 and a New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of 2013.

My Other Life

My Other Life
Author: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 466
Release: 1997-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780395877524

A fictionalized autobiography of a travel writer. There are descriptions of his experiences as a teacher of English in an African village, his meeting with the writer, Anthony Burgess, and his encounter with Queen Elizabeth of England.

Big in China

Big in China
Author: Alan Paul
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062065823

"What a romp….Alan Paul walked the walk, preaching the blues in China. Anyone who doubts that music is bigger than words needs to read this great tale." —Gregg Allman "An absolute love story. In his embrace of family, friends, music and the new culture he's discovering, Alan Paul leaves us contemplating the love in our own lives, and rethinking the concept of home." —Jeffrey Zaslow, coauthor, with Randy Pausch, of The Last Lecture Alan Paul, award–winning author of the Wall Street Journal’s online column “The Expat Life,” gives his engaging, inspiring, and unforgettable memoir of blues and new beginnings in Beijing. Paul’s three-and-a-half-year journey reinventing himself as an American expat—while raising a family and starting the revolutionary blues band Woodie Alan, voted Beijing Band of the Year in the 2008—is a must-read adventure for anyone who has lived abroad, and for everyone who dreams of rewriting the story of their own future.