Authors textbooks and reviews http://www.jdwright.us/ JDWright Books Pendleton Don http://www.jdwright.us/P/Pendleton---Don/

Betrayed (Superbolan)


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On the verge of creating a breakthrough peace initiative in the Middle East, Dr. Sharif Mahoud is on the run, hunted by purveyors of terror who see the true threat of a powerful visionary bringing bitter rivals to the bargaining table. Dr. Mahoud is good for peace, and good for the world—which is why the Oval Office directs Mack Bolan to track down the brilliant negotiator hiding deep within the Afghan hills, locate his stranded family, then get them all to safety. But the mission is compromised from the start with hostile forces dogging Bolan's every move. Soon, the true face of the enemy begins to emerge: beyond the violent radicals and extremist thugs, stand the rich and powerful investors and shadow men who understand that warfare is big business—and will do whatever it takes to keep turning a profit on blood and suffering.

Frontier Fury (The Executioner)


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A covert airdrop lands Mack Bolan inside the brutal northern Pakistan border territory. From deep within a terrorist cell an informant has leaked crucial information to Stony Man Farm. He knows the location of two of the highest-ranking members of al Qaeda. They are the most wanted men in the world, and they've spent years dodging American troops and plotting further attacks worldwide.

Now Bolan is in hostile territory on a mission to eliminate men who will stop at nothing in pursuit of vengeance. And he faces government troops determined to protect the terrorists. With time running out and the enemy closing in, the Executioner must do what no one else has—settle the score.

System Corruption (The Executioner)


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Frank Carella is just doing his job when he makes a horrifying discovery--a major contractor has knowingly supplied substandard armor to the U.S. military. When Carella becomes a whistle-blower he unwittingly alerts the men behind a sinister and deadly cover-up.

Mack Bolan is drawn into the hunt when Carella's life is suddenly under threat as the incriminating information he has gathered becomes the prize in a deadly chase. Bolan must navigate a network of sabotage and deception with a well-organized enemy closing ranks around him. As bodies start piling up, Bolan knows his only chance is to get to the finish line first. Fortunately, it's a game that the Executioner plays with deadly skill....

Dark Alliance (The Executioner)


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From the lazy heat of Miami to the steamy Colombian jungles, Mack Bolan is on the trail of a missing American journalist. The woman was close to exposing the key players in a dangerous drug cartel, and Bolan figures they snatched her to protect their illicit empire. Each step pulls him further into an unforgiving world of guns and violence until he himself is captured.

The vicious drug czar responsible for Bolan's plight reveals a carefully planned conspiracy that could topple a government...and an entire nation. Tortured and beaten, Bolan is only seconds away from escape...or death. His only advantage: the enemy isn't banking on the unrelenting force known as The Executioner.

Hostile Odds (The Executioner)


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The illicit activities of an organized crime family draw Mack Bolan to California, where he uncovers a deadly power struggle. It seems a branch of this family tree extends to a small town in Oregon where the Mob-s influence runs deep. Following the bloody trail, Bolan takes his war across the state line.

Profits from prostitution, drugs and numbers rackets tied to several local businesses are being funneled to a radical ecoterrorist group more than willing to strike out against anything--and anyone--standing in its way. A war is brewing and the small town is under siege. Faced with mounting casualties, the Executioner will have to use his own methods to clean up the environment.

Lethal Compound (The Executioner)


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U.S. intelligence agents become aware of a wealthy American's plans only when they intercept the chatter of Chinese spies. It is the billionaire's intention to lead a secret archaeological expedition into the mountainous border triangle between Afghanistan, China and Tajikistan. Mack Bolan is inserted within the group as they head into an area that is a hotbed of opium production.

Traveling undercover with a group of foreign mercenaries hired to act as private security, Bolan knows that priceless treasure isn't the only thing hidden in the mountains of Tajikistan. And when they come under attack by Russian fighter jets, it becomes apparent to the Executioner that the unstable region is about to blow.

]]> P Leibovitz Annie http://www.jdwright.us/L/Leibovitz---Annie/

Annie Leibovitz at Work


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“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it."
—Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon's resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama's campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.

Amazon Exclusive Essay: Annie Leibovitz on Photography

In 1977, when Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, asked me to prepare a fifty-page portfolio of my pictures for the tenth anniversary issue of the magazine, I decided not to simply make a selection of photographs that had been published. I looked at everything I had done since I started working. It was a revelation. For one thing, I had no idea that I had accumulated so many photographs. You lose track of them when you’re working every day. And you see the work in a different way when you look at it from the distance of time. You get a sense of where you are going. You start to see a life.

I had the opportunity to edit my work most thoroughly when I prepared two retrospective books, Annie Leibovitz: 1970–1990 and A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005. It was thrilling to see that first book laid out chronologically. To see the pictures historically. The second book, A Photographer’s Life, was assembled immediately after the death of Susan Sontag and my father. Editing the book took me through the grieving process.

The books are pure. They are mine. The magazines I work for don’t belong to me. It’s the editor’s magazine, and the editor has every right to use the material the way he or she wants to. It isn’t just that art directors and editors at magazines make selections that I wouldn’t necessarily make. Which they sometimes do. Or that they run pictures too small. Or that they put so much type on the pictures that you can’t see them anymore. Magazines have quite specific needs. It’s a collaboration only so far, which is true of almost all assignment work.

When I began working on my new book, I thought it would be a pamphlet of maybe forty pages or so. I intended to take ten of my photographs and dissect them. They didn’t have to be my most famous pictures, just pictures that I cared about. But as I began going through the material I realized that I might as well be more ambitious. I started to think that I would try to answer every single question anyone has ever asked about how my work is done. To defuse the mystery, and the misconceptions. To explain that it’s nothing more than work. And learning how to see.

So my forty-page pamphlet became a 240-page book with over a hundred photographs in it. It is written for someone like the person I was at the beginning of my career, when I was in art school. A young me. I didn’t know which road I would take. Whether it would be a commercial road, a magazine road, an artistic road, a journalistic road. It’s written for that person. Someone who is interested in photography but isn’t sure how they want to use it.

The book is more emotional than I had imagined it would be. But, most importantly, it is my edit. No one is going to care about, or understand, your work the way you do, and if you are going to explain it you have to be able to present it the way you want to. That’s what a book can do better than any other medium.

See Annie Leibovitz's 15 favorite photography books.

(Photo credit Paul Gilmore)

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005


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“I don’t have two lives,” Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990 to 2005. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Portraits of well-known figures–Johnny Cash, Nicole Kidman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, and William Burroughs–appear alongside pictures of Leibovitz’s family and friends, reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early Nineties, and landscapes. The pictures form a narrative of a life rich in contrasts and continuities. The photographer has a long relationship that ends with illness and death. She chronicles the celebrations and heartbreaks of her large and robust family. She has children of her own. All the while, she is working, and the public work resonates with the themes of the life.

Women


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The photographs by Annie Leibovitz in Women, taken especially for the book, encompass a broad spectrum of subjects: a rap artist, an astronaut, two Supreme Court justices, farmers, coal miners, movie stars, showgirls, rodeo riders, socialites, reporters, dancers, a maid, a general, a surgeon, the First Lady of the United States, the secretary of state, a senator, rock stars, prostitutes, teachers, singers, athletes, poets, writers, painters, musicians, theater directors, political activists, performance artists, and businesswomen. "Each of these pictures must stand on its own," Susan Sontag writes in the essay that accompanies the portraits. "But the ensemble says, So this what women are now -- as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this."

Each of the extraordinary portraits made by photographer Annie Leibovitz for her book Women stands on its own. Looked at together, these "photographs of people with nothing more in common than that they are women (and living in America at the end of the twentieth century), all--well almost all--fully clothed," writes Susan Sontag in the book's preface, form "an anthology of destinies and disabilities and new possibilities." Leibovitz, who in her years working for Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Vanity Fair magazines has photographed hundreds of celebrities, turns her lens on a wide range of ordinary and extraordinary female subjects: coal miners, socialites, first ladies, artists, domestic-violence victims, an astronaut, a surgeon, a maid. What she creates is a reflection of contemporary American womanhood that mirrors both women's accomplishments and the challenges they still face individually and as a group.

Leibovitz demonstrates her own range as a photographer in this body of work, shooting in the studio and natural settings and working in both black-and-white and color film. She depicts model Jerry Hall wearing a little black dress, a fur coat, and high heels, staring frankly at the viewer from a velvet chair in a plush red parlor while her naked infant son nurses from her exposed right breast. Schoolteacher Lamis Srour's eyes--the only part of her face visible behind her heavy black veil--illuminate a dark black-and-white portrait. Leibovitz frames actress Elizabeth Taylor and her dog Sugar by their shocks of snow-white hair. She captures four Kilgore College Rangerettes, a drill team, at the apex of their kicks--white-booted legs pointing up, obscuring their faces and revealing the red underpants beneath their blue miniskirts. There are many more wonderful and unexpected images here, over 200 in all. The delight in discovering them awaits readers. --Jordana Moskowitz

Annie Leibovitz Photographs 1970-1990


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Annie Leibovitz: American Music


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The impulse to do AMERICAN MUSIC, writes famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, “came from a desire to return to my original subject and look at it with a mature eye. Bring my experience to it…make it a real American tapestry.” Her ambitious idea became AMERICAN MUSIC, a stunning collection of photographs of the musicians, places and people that enrich the landscape of American music.

As Rolling Stone’s chief photographer for over thirteen years, Leibovitz created a legendary body of work. Her portraits of some of the world’s most talented musicians capture more than the performer, they convey the art of making music. For AMERICAN MUSIC, Leibovitz traveled across the country to juke joints in the Mississippi Delta, honkytonks in Texas, and jazz clubs in New Orleans “to take pictures in places that mean something.” In her signature style, she shares stunning portraits of American greats -- B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Beck, Bob Dylan, Mary J. Blige, Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Earle, Ryan Adams, Miles Davis, Etta James, Pete Seeger, Emmylou Harris, Tom Waits, The Dixie Chicks, Dr. Dre, The Roots and many more.

AMERICAN MUSIC includes a commentary about the American Music project by Leibovitz, short essays by musicians Patti Smith, Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle, Mos Def, Ryan Adams, and Beck as well as biographical sketches of all the musicians.
It looks like a gorgeous nostalgia trip to judge by the cover image alone. The photo is of an old school record player that lies unplugged, a white label test-pressing waiting on the turntable, while a band of paper wrapped around the cover announces the title in ye olde woodblock-looking type, American Music. A reading of the small type on the back cover reveals the image to be the very record and turntable left in Elvis Presley’s bedroom the day he died, and the mind reels, thinking about whether the King listened to this record on that day or not, and who are the Stamps, anyway? An excellent selection of musician portraits interspersed with crumbly wooden jook joints and wide open fields in the South, American Music covers a wide gamut of jazz, blues, punk, country, hip-hop, rock and roll, folk and gospel musicians. And while most of the pictures were shot between 1999 and 2002, some go back to the early 1970s, when Leibovitz first became Rolling Stone magazine's chief photographer. Some of the artists are very well-known (Michael Stipe, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan) and some of them are not (Jessie Mae Hemphill, Other Turner, Carlos Coy). Leibovitz really has a way of relaxing her performers, and this is a great part of her gift. Even when the pictures are so posed as to be ridiculous (like, what's Michael Stipe doing on that bedbug-ridden mattress—-the guy's a billionaire?), she catches her subjects at their most "real." They are lost in their music, or just doing some "real person" thing (look, there is Beck in his car—does Beck really drive his own car?). The presentation may be a little hokey, but this book is sure to please most any music fan. --Mike McGonigal

Annie Leibovitz: Photographs Portfolio 1970-1990 (Stern Portfolio Library of Photography)


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With more than 200 color and black-and-white photographs, this stunning collection spans the first 20 years of work by one of the most important photographers of our time.
]]> L Rabe David http://www.jdwright.us/R/Rabe---David/

The Vietnam Plays: Volume II: Streamers and The Orphan (Rabe, David)


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In this volume, Streamers, the story of a group of paratroopers desperately attempting to cope with the chaos of their emotions when they are ordered to Vietnam, is paired with The Orphan, a brilliant synthesis of classic Greek drama and the conflicted character of contemporary America. War is not a political phenomenon but an elemental force, a human inevitability, like love or death, and Rabe’s plays encompass it as such.

The Black Monk and The Dog Problem: Two Plays


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The Black Monk has been called a singular "collaboration" between two writers: Anton Chekhov and David Rabe. Based on Chekov's novella of the same name, Rabe's brilliant stage adaptation tells the story of Kovrin, the young philosophy student who returns from Moscow to the estate owned by Pesotsky, where he spent his youth. Kovrin and Pesotsky's daughter, Tanya, soon fall in love and plan to marry. But the appearance of an emissary from the unknown -- the black monk -- threatens to have a devastating effect on all of them.

Trouble starts in when Teresa tells her brother Joey that this guy Ray did something to her with his dog in bed. Nobody seems to know exactly what happened, but they do know that somebody's got to pay. So what is The Dog Problem? It starts with being born into a world where the wrong thing said to the wrong person ignites a chain reaction of misplaced passions and galloping sentences that race to a deadly conclusion. The playful title is revealed to be a wry pun on the Cartesian mind/body problem, as Uncle Mal, the aging mobster, must face his turn to be the dog in this darkly funny play about men, women, sex, betrayal, and ghosts.

Vastly different in their aesthetic, these two recent and highly praised plays embody all of the celebrated hallmarks of David Rabe's writing and art: unflinchingly honest and perceptive themes, starkly luminous dialogue, and the unsettling humor that have made him an icon of the American theater for more than forty years.

Streamers


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Full Length, Drama / 11 m / Int. This volatile, incendiary drama premiered in 1976 under the direction of Mike Nichols, produced by Joseph Papp at New York's Lincoln Center. Revived in 2008 by the Roundabout Theatre, the third in author Rabe's quartet of "Vietnam Plays" is set in the Army barracks housing a group of young men, the "streamers" of the title: hapless parachutists who streak to certain death when their parachutes fail to open. This group includes Billy, a new recruit; Roger, a street-wise refugee from the ghetto; Richie, a sarcastic, bitter homosexual and their sodden, ineffectual sergeants, Cokes and Rooney. Awaiting deployment to Vietnam, they are joined by Carlyle, an angry, psychotic young black man, whose presence sets off an escalating spiral of violence and death. By the author of Sticks and Bones and HurlyBurly "Hard hitting and extremely funny. A masterly drama with humor, power and impressive depths of understanding."-New York Daily News

Hurlyburly and Those the River Keeps: Two Plays


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In the Boom Boom Room: Revised to the Original Two Acts


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Book jacket/back: This extensively revised version of David Rabe's 1973 play returns it to the two-act structure originally intended by the author, as it sharpens and focuses his searing portrait of a young dancer's descent into hell.

The Vietnam Plays: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel ; Sticks and Bones


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The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, which won the young David Rabe an Obie and was hailed by The New York Times as “rich in humor, irony, and insight,” is the story of a naive recruit’s initiation into war. Sticks and Bones concerns a blinded Vietnam veteran who, returning home numbed by the war, is astonished by his family’s inability to comprehend their country’s politics and his rage.
]]> R Salter Mary Jo http://www.jdwright.us/S/Salter---Mary-Jo/

Sunday Skaters: Poems


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A third collection of poems highlights tones of playfulness, wisdom, compassion, and profundity while following a woman's deeply personal journeys through love, family, place, and time. Reprint.

Open Shutters: Poems


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Mary Jo Salter’s sparkling new collection, Open Shutters, leads us into a world where things are often not what they seem. In the first poem, “Trompe l’Oeil,” the shadow-casting shutters on Genoese houses are made of paint only, an “open lie.” And yet “Who needs to be correct / more often than once a day? / Who needs real shadow more than play?”

Open Shutters also calls to mind the lens of a camera—in the villanelle “School Pictures” or in the stirring sequence “In the Guesthouse,” which, inspired by photographs of a family across three generations, offers at once a social history of America and a love story.

Darkness and light interact throughout the book—in poems about September 11; about a dog named Shadow; about a blind centenarian who still pretends to read the paper; about a woman shaken by the death of her therapist. A section of light verse highlights the wit and grace that have long distinguished Salter’s most serious work.

Fittingly, the volume fools the eye once more by closing with “An Open Book,” in which a Muslim family praying at a funeral seek consolation in the pages formed by their upturned palms.

Open Shutters is the achievement of a remarkable poet, whose concerns and stylistic range continue to grow, encompassing ever larger themes, becoming ever more open.

Northern Anthology of Poetry


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Unfinished Painting


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A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems


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This “wholly attractive volume” that brings together twenty-five years of “elegantly shaped and voiced creations” (William Pritchard, The Boston Globe) offers a generous sampling of Mary Jo Salter’s five previous award-winning volumes and a collection of superb new poems. A mid-career retrospective of one of the major poets of her generation.

A Kiss in Space: Poems


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From the first poem, which takes us up in a hot-air balloon over Chartres, to the last, in which a Russian cosmonaut welcomes an American colleague onto the Mir space station, Mary Jo Salter's exhilarating fourth collection draws the reader into the long distances of the imagination and the intimacies of the heart. Poignant poems about her own past--such as "Libretto," in which a childhood initiation into opera merges with a family drama--are set against historical poems such as "The Seven Weepers," where a nineteenth-century English explorer in Australia comes face-to-face with the Aborigines his own people have doomed to decimation. The book's centerpiece, "Alternating Currents," juxtaposes real historical figures like Alexander Graham Bell and Helen Keller with their fictional contemporaries Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, as each of them plumbs the mysteries of perception. Along the way are poems on family life, on films (from home movies to Hollywood romances), on travel in France, and on works of art (from a child's fingerpainted refrigerator magnet to Titian's last painting).

In this splendid and engaging collection, Mary Jo Salter pays homage with wit and compassion to the precious dailiness of life on earth, while gazing tantalizingly beyond its boundaries to view such wondrous events as a kiss in space.
Encapsulated within each of Mary Jo Salter's poems is a story. There are characters (the poet, her children, her parents, friends) and events (a balloon ride outside of Paris, an afternoon spent listening to Puccini, an evening in front of the television). And there is a strong narrative theme--enough to fill a whole novel--in every poem. In "Libretto," for example, Salter describes her first introduction to opera under her mother's tutelage, foreshadowing within the first few lines the melancholy end of this story: "but why are we alone? / Were Daddy and my brothers gone / all day, or has memory with its flair / for simple compositions air- / brushed them from the shot?" Mother and daughter sit on "an ivory silk couch that doesn't fit / the life she's given in Detroit" and listen to the strains of Madame Butterfly while gazing out the window at the neighbors' two-car garages. Ominously, Salter reports, "It's 1962 / and though I'm only eight, I know / that with two cars, people can separate."

Some of Salter's most powerful poems concentrate on the prosaic: "A Leak Somewhere" describes a family watching an old movie about the Titanic on television. But Salter invests even this safe domestic drama with vague unease as the parents, having put the children to bed, are overcome with a sense

that hidden in the house a fine
crack--nothing spectacular,
only a leak somewhere--is slowly
widening to claim each of us
in random order, and we start to rock
in one another's arms.
These poems are deceptively simple: one doesn't have to read them several times to understand their point. Yet the intelligence behind them--the careful choice of images, the way detail upon detail accretes like amber hardening around an insect to form a whole universe in microcosm--makes these very complex works, indeed. A Kiss in Space is eloquent, elegant, and a pleasure to read and reread. --Alix Wilber
]]> S Bierce Ambrose http://www.jdwright.us/B/Bierce---Ambrose/

The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce


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American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce is probably best known for his short stories about the American Civil War. The author's craft for story-telling is exemplified by his famous "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge", which is the story of Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer condemned to die by hanging upon the Owl Creek Bridge. That great short story along with 96 others forms this exhaustive edition of "The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce."

Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce


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modern horror stories by American master. "The Eyes of the Panther," "The Damned Thing," 21 more. "These pieces are not dated, nor are they lacking any of the narrative elements necessary to attract and hold the attention of anyone interested in the horror genre."—SF Booklog.

The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary


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"The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary" is a virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, offering some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Ambrose Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth. The "Unabridged Devil's Dictionary,"a satirical book first published in 1911, offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language which lampoon cant and political doublespeak. The Devil's Dictionary has inspired many imitations both in its day and more recently. Recent examples include The Computer Contradictionary. Ambrose Bierce was an iconoclastic literary genius and "The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary," a compilation of his satirical definitions, is a true American classic. Some may find Bierce sexist, nationalist and racist, but most readers will enjoy his malevolent skepticism and underlying rage against hypocrisy. Only two years after "The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary" was published in 1911, Ambrose Bierce disappeared after setting off for Mexico to join Pancho Villa's rebels against the corrupt dictatorial regime of Porfirio Diaz. His legacy is memorable.

Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers


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One of America’s foremost language experts presents an annotated edition of A mbrose Bierce’s classic catalog of correct speech.

Ambrose Bierce is best known for The Devil's Dictionary, but the prolific journalist, satirist, and fabulist was also a usage maven.  In 1909, he published several hundred of his pet peeves in Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults.

Bierce's list includes some distinctions still familiar today--the which-that rule, less vs. fewer, lie and lay -- but it also abounds in now-forgotten shibboleths: Ovation, the critics of his time agreed, meant a Roman triumph, not a round of applause. Reliable was an ill-formed coinage, not for the discriminating. Donate was pretentious, jeopardize should be jeopard, demean meant "comport oneself," not "belittle." And Bierce made up a few peeves of his own for good measure. We should say "a coating of paint," he instructed, not "a coat."

To mark the 100th anniversary of Write It Right, language columnist Jan Freeman has investigated  where Bierce's rules and taboos originated, how they've fared in the century since the blacklist, and what lies ahead. Will our language quibbles seem as odd in 2109 as Bierce's do today?  From the evidence offered here, it looks like a very good bet.

Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories (Webster's Spanish Thesaurus Edition)


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Webster's edition of this classic is organized to expose the reader to a maximum number of synonyms and antonyms for difficult and often ambiguous English words that are encountered in other works of literature, conversation, or academic examinations. Extremely rare or idiosyncratic words and expressions are given lower priority in the notes compared to words which are ¿difficult, and often encountered¿ in examinations. Rather than supply a single synonym, many are provided for a variety of meanings, allowing readers to better grasp the ambiguity of the English language, and avoid using the notes as a pure crutch. Having the reader decipher a word's meaning within context serves to improve vocabulary retention and understanding. Each page covers words not already highlighted on previous pages. If a difficult word is not noted on a page, chances are that it has been highlighted on a previous page. A more complete thesaurus is supplied at the end of the book; synonyms and antonyms are extracted from Webster's Online Dictionary.

PSAT¿ is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT¿ is a registered trademark of the College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE¿, AP¿ and Advanced Placement¿ are registered trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither sponsors nor endorses this book, GMAT¿ is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admissions Council which is neither affiliated with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT¿ is a registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council which neither sponsors nor endorses this product. All rights reserved.

The Devil's Dictionary


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The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. It offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language which lampoon cant and political doublespeak.
]]> B Onassis Jacqueline Kennedy http://www.jdwright.us/O/Onassis---Jacqueline-Kennedy/

The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Novel


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Jackie Kennedy quite famously said, "I want to live my life, not record it." She remains elusive, her interior life hidden, her feelings and motivations secret. Yet who has not wondered what lay behind those sunglasses? Haven't we all wondered how Jackie felt about Jack's womanizing? How could she not have known?  How did she tolerate it?  How did her childhood passions and turbulent family life shape her choices?  How did her love of fashion and culture influence the White House?  What did she think about Marilyn Monroe? Why did she ever marry Onassis?  What made her take a job in publishing when she clearly didn't need one?  How did she endure the loss of her babies, the pressure of the Kennedy political machine, the murder of her husband, the never ending paparazzi, and the news of her imminent death? 

In this powerful, poignant, and sweeping novel, Ruth Francisco tells Jackie's story in Jackie's voice and boldly plunges into the subtext of her public life, reimagining her thoughts and feelings between the lines of recorded history.

America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis


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"Some of the most personally knowledgeable observations about [Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis] that have ever been put into print." (The Boston Globe)

"Compulsively readable." (The Washington Post)

Acclaimed biographer Sarah Bradford explores the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the woman who has captivated the public for more than five decades, in a definitive portrait that is both sympathetic and frank. With an extraordinary range of candid interviews-many with people who have never spoken in such depth on record before-Bradford offers new insights into the woman behind the public persona. She creates a coherent picture out of Jackie's tumultuous and cosmopolitan life-from the aristocratic milieu of Newport and East Hampton to the Greek isles, from political Washington to New York's publishing community. She probes Jackie's privileged upbringing, her highly public marriages, and her roles as mother and respected editor, and includes rare photos from private collections to create the most complete account yet written of this legendary life.
Fresh from her well-received life of Queen Elizabeth II, the English historian and biographer Sarah Bradford turns her hand to America's own answer to royalty, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Painstakingly detailed, impressively fair, the result is the most definitive account yet of a woman who captured the imagination of the American public like no First Lady before or after her. Bradford seems to have interviewed almost everyone who had ever been intimate with Onassis, including George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, Joan Kennedy, and even a few ex-lovers. Most notably of all, Jackie's sister Lee Radziwill speaks with unexpected frankness about the mixture of rivalry and affection that marked their relationship since childhood. Jackie-lovers, take note: this is no hagiography, and its subject certainly comes off as no saint. As gracious as this American icon could be, she also had moments of coldness and even greed, including a particularly shocking moment by the bedside of Ari Onassis's dying son. Yet, in the end, non-airbrushed anecdotes like these only serve to make this most private of public figures even more fascinating. Jackie was, as Bradford writes, "a complex woman of many facets, concealed insecurities and intricate defense mechanisms, a strong urge toward the limelight contrasting with a desire for privacy and concealment.... Behind the mask of beauty and fame lay a shrewd mind, a ruthless judgment of people, antennae finely turned to any sign of pretentiousness or pomposity, and a wry, even raunchy sense of humor." The figure who emerges from subsequent pages is as compelling as the heroine of any novel, and it is to Bradford's credit that she doesn't seem to have fallen completely under her subject's spell. Her approach is sympathetic, but never fawning; candid, but never sensationalistic. For those who are curious not about Jackie's glamour but about its source, America's Queen offers an unprecedented look at the flesh-and-blood woman behind the Camelot myth. --Carlotta DeWitt

The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis


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  • Adapt: NEW
  • ISBN13: 9781401302481
  • Notes: Mark New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

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Timed to the publication of the author+s new illustrated children+s book, A Family of Poems, the national bestseller is now available in a specially priced gift editionJacqueline Kennedy Onassis loved literature, especially poetry. -Once you can express yourself,+ she wrote, +you can tell the world what you want from it+All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words.+ Now, Caroline Kennedy shares her mother+s favorite poems and the worlds behind her strong belief in the power of literature. A wonderful volume for reading aloud or by yourself, a meaningful gift or keepsake, The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis offers an intimate view of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis+ world, and a poignant glimpse into her heart.

The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis


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  • Make ready: USED - VERY GOOD
  • ISBN13: 9780786868094
  • Notes:

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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis loved literature, especially poetry. Once you can express yourself, she wrote, you can tell the world what you want from it. Now, Caroline Kennedy shares her mothers favorite poems by such renowned authors as William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, and Robert Frost. The book also includes a poem written by Jacqueline Kennedy and is illustrated with photographs of the Kennedy clan. This is a wonderful volume for reading aloud or by yourself and a meaningful gift or keepsake for Mothers Day.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: Legendary First Lady (People to Know)


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The Eloquent Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words (With a One-Hour DVD Insert from A&E Biography)


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As her own words prove well, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis could be at times funny, buoyant, candid, irreverent, and of course poignant, too. This collection of quotes shares her thoughts on marriage, family, political life and ambition, publicity, privacy, and more as she confided them to intimate friends, family, and interviewers alike.

Memories of her childhood, her love for Jack, her children and grandchildren, the Kennedys, her often misunderstood marriage to Aristotle Onassis, her years as a widow, and her later companionship with Maurice Tempelsman are all represented here, as are some rather remarkable correspondences with the Johnsons, the Nixons, and the Khrushchevs.

A sampling of her wit and wisdom:

  • "I was a tomboy. I decided to learn to dance and I became feminine."

  • "Well, I think my biggest achievement is that, after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane."

  • "When Harvard men say they have graduated from Radcliffe, then we've made it."

  • "If Jack proved to be the greatest president of the century and his children turned out badly, it would be a tragedy."

    • Forty years ago, when the nation was coming out from under a period of mourning, Bill Adler edited The Kennedy Wit and in so doing helped the world remember a man and a president, not just a sorrowful event. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's death, he has edited yet another book of quotes celebrating life -- this time the life of Jackie.

    The accompanying DVD documentary is considered by many to be the definitive film biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and was produced by CBS News Productions for Arts & Entertainment Network.

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