The Man Who Walked Backward

Author : Ben Montgomery
Publisher : Little, Brown Spark
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2018-09-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780316438049

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The Man Who Walked Backward by Ben Montgomery Pdf

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery, the story of a Texas man who, during the Great Depression, walked around the world -- backwards. Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary -- something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he'd lost. He decided to walk around the world -- backwards. In The Man Who Walked Backward, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery charts Plennie's backwards trek across the America that gave rise to Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and the New Deal. With the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a backdrop, Montgomery follows Plennie across the Atlantic through Germany, Turkey, and beyond, and details the daring physical feats, grueling hardships, comical misadventures, and hostile foreign police he encountered along the way. A remarkable and quirky slice of Americana, The Man Who Walked Backward paints a rich and vibrant portrait of a jaw-dropping period of history.

Author : Plennie L. Wingo
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1983
Category : Depressions
ISBN : 0890153639

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Around the World Backwards by Plennie L. Wingo Pdf

Author : Catherine Austen
Publisher : Orca Book Publishers
Page : 175 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2009-10-01
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 9781554695553

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Walking Backward by Catherine Austen Pdf

When Josh's mother dies in a phobia-induced car crash, she leaves two questions for her grieving family: how did a snake get into her car and how do you mourn with no faith to guide you? Twelve-year-old Josh is left alone to find the answers. His father is building a time machine. His four-year-old brother's closest friend is a plastic Power Ranger. His psychiatrist offers nothing more than a blank journal and platitudes. Isolated by grief in a home where every day is pajama day, Josh makes death his research project. He tests the mourning practices of religions he doesn't believe in. He tries to mend his little brother's shattered heart. He observes, records and waits—for his life to feel normal, for his mother's death to make sense, for his father to come out of the basement. His observations, recorded in a series of journal entries, are funny, smart, insightful—and heartbreaking. His conclusions about the nature of love, loss, grief and the space-time continuum are nothing less than life-changing.

Author : Ben Sures
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2018-08
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1927849497

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The Boy Who Walked Backwards by Ben Sures Pdf

Author : Mark W. Turner
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Cruising (Sexual behavior)
ISBN : 1861891806

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Backward Glances by Mark W. Turner Pdf

Focusing upon gay street life in London and New York, Mark Turner presents this gay urban history of male street cruising.

Author : Jae
Publisher : L-Book ePublisher
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781934889084

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Backwards to Oregon by Jae Pdf

Lesbian Fiction: Historical Fiction - "Luke" Hamilton has always been sure that she'd never marry. She accepted that she would spend her life alone when she chose to live her life disguised as a man. After working in a brothel for three years, Nora Macauley has lost all illusions about love. She no longer hopes for a man who will sweep her off her feet and take her away to begin a new, respectable life. But now they find themselves married and on the way to Oregon in a covered wagon, with two thousand miles ahead of them.

Author : Jann Arden
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2012-02-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780307399854

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Falling Backwards by Jann Arden Pdf

Jann Arden is funny. And sincere. She has legions of devoted fans. And a radio show. She is a darling of the music scene—always candid, always unplugged. You thought you knew Jann Arden, but there is more—to her readers' delight, in Falling Backwards Jann reveals her childhood, her bond with family, her struggle in the formative years and what keeps her so grounded in the whirlwind entertainment industry. Jann has always been true to herself, except for a minor lapse when she was young. Oh wait, wasn't that all of us? From the tender and honest to the laugh-out-loud funny, Jann's stories from home and from the road during her pre-celebrity years will take you to unexpected places, including high school parties in farmer's fields, sleepovers under the stars, hard-to-believe summer jobs and the time she was stuck upside down in a brick barbecue. She reminds us of the inestimable value to a child of having teachers who believe in you and wide open spaces to play. But with the good times come the bad (and not just the bad perm). Jann opens up about the darker side of her so-called prairie perfect nuclear family and the first signs that her eldest brother was a uniquely troubled young man. In the days when Jann was experiencing a lot of firsts—first school play, first home perm, first kiss—how lucky for all of us that she stole away to her basement and taught herself her first song on her mother's guitar. In addition to being an incredible musician and multi-award-winning lyricist, Jann is a natural writer and simply an inspiration. Jann will capture your heart—and keep you in stitches—with her powerful stories about coming of age as an artist and as a human being. Jann brings her wit and that infectious sparkle to everything she does. This book is no exception.

Author : Colin Bryar,Bill Carr
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2021-02-09
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781250267603

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Working Backwards by Colin Bryar,Bill Carr Pdf

Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time Amazon executives—with lessons and techniques you can apply to your own company, and career, right now. In Working Backwards, two long-serving Amazon executives reveal the principles and practices that have driven the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them—much of it during the period of unmatched innovation that created products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was developed and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels of the company. With a focus on customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence, Amazon’s ground-level practices ensure these characteristics are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business. Working Backwards is both a practical guidebook and the story of how the company grew to become so successful. It is filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how their time at the company affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices—shared here for the very first time. Whatever your talent, career or organization might be, find out how you can put Working Backwards to work for you.

Author : Marcel Ayme
Publisher : Pushkin Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2012-06-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781908968203

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The Man who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Ayme Pdf

The excellent Monsieur Dutilleul has always been able to pass through walls, but has never seen the point of using his gift, given the general availability of doors. One day, however, his tyrannical boss drives him to desperate, creative measures — he develops a taste for intramural travel and becomes something of a super-villain. How will the unassuming clerk adjust to a glamorous life of crime? Aymé’s genius lies in imagining the practical unfolding of bizarre and difficult situations. In each story, anarchic comedy is arrested by moments of pathos, only to descend into anarchy and hilarity once more ...

Author : Tom Robbins
Publisher : Bantam
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2006-08-29
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780553902945

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Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins Pdf

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels–expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow–Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country- music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. Whether he is rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Robbins’s briefer writings often exhibit the same five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are a couple of short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an off-beat assessment of our divided nation. And wherever we open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, we’re apt to encounter examples of the intently serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”

Author : Charles F. Hall
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 54 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2017-09-26
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1976499410

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The Man Who Lived Backwards and Other Stories by Charles F. Hall Pdf

Charles F. Hall's story "The Man who Lived Backwards" is known to have influenced C.S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce." Hall published three short stories in various periodicals in1938. This volume collects the three known stories by Hall, with an introduction by Douglas A. Anderson detailing all that is known about the writer.--cf. p. [4] of cover.

Author : Ben Montgomery
Publisher : Chicago Review Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2014-04-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781613747216

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Grandma Gatewood's Walk by Ben Montgomery Pdf

Winner of the 2014 National Outdoor Book Awards for History/Biography Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin. There she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it." Grandma Gatewood, as the reporters called her, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity and appeared on TV and in the pages of Sports Illustrated. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction. Author Ben Montgomery was given unprecedented access to Gatewood's own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence, and interviewed surviving family members and those she met along her hike, all to answer the question so many asked: Why did she do it? The story of Grandma Gatewood will inspire readers of all ages by illustrating the full power of human spirit and determination. Even those who know of Gatewood don't know the full story—a story of triumph from pain, rebellion from brutality, hope from suffering.

Author : Jon Ronson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2011-06-28
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9781451665970

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The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson Pdf

Now a major film, starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, and Jeff Bridges, this New York Times bestseller is a disturbing and often hilarious look at the U.S. military's long flirtation with the paranormal—and the psy-op soldiers that are still fighting the battle. Bizarre military history: In 1979, a crack commando unit was established by the most gifted minds within the U.S. Army. Defying all known laws of physics and accepted military practice, they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and—perhaps most chillingly—kill goats just by staring at them. They were the First Earth Battalion, entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries. And they really weren’t joking. What’s more, they’re back—and they’re fighting the War on Terror. An uproarious exploration of American military paranoia: With investigations ranging from the mysterious “Goat Lab,” to Uri Geller’s covert psychic work with the CIA, to the increasingly bizarre role played by a succession of U.S. presidents, this might just be the funniest, most unsettling book you will ever read—if only because it is all true and is still happening today.

Author : Miranda Esmonde-White
Publisher : Random House Canada
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2014-11-04
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9780345814098

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Aging Backwards by Miranda Esmonde-White Pdf

A ground-breaking guide to understanding how aging happens in our cells and how to maintain and repair those cells--and roll back joint pain and muscle loss at any age--through gentle, scientifically designed workouts based on Classical Stretch and Essentrics, developed by the author and star of PBS's Classical Stretch series. It's never too late to slow down, or even reverse, the effects of aging. The human body is designed to function for the full length of its life--and with gentle, full-body flexibility and strengthening exercises we can look and feel tremendous, vibrant and active at any age, and well into our senior years. After all, the body is the world's most efficient self-healing machine. And yet, remarkably, many of us neglect the single most important system in the body--the one that makes all the others work--the muscular system. The typical message we get as we age is that we can move less and should take it easy--exactly the wrong advice. Surprisingly, fitness enthusiasts often do as much harm to their bodies as people living sedentary lives. For example, yoga instructors get tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome from daily stress on wrists and elbows; Pilates instructors suffer pectoral and tricep muscle atrophy and even professional athletes grow overweight and suffer countless ACL, meniscus and disc injuries. Ligaments are virtually ignored by most exercises routines and yet joint health is essential in order to remain active. But these afflictions don't happen overnight, and with Aging Backwards we can slow or prevent their onset, and often reverse their symptoms.

Author : Amor Towles
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 593 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2021-10-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780735222373

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The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles Pdf

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER More than ONE MILLION copies sold A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick A New York Times Notable Book, and Chosen by Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bill Gates and Barack Obama as a Best Book of the Year “Wise and wildly entertaining . . . permeated with light, wit, youth.” —The New York Times Book Review “A classic that we will read for years to come.” —Jenna Bush Hager, Read with Jenna book club “Fantastic. Set in 1954, Towles uses the story of two brothers to show that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as we might hope.” —Bill Gates “A real joyride . . . elegantly constructed and compulsively readable.” —NPR The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes. “Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes. Towles is not a one-trick pony. Like all the best storytellers, he has range. He takes inspiration from famous hero’s journeys, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men. He seems to be saying that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as an interstate highway. But, he suggests, when something (or someone) tries to steer us off course, it is possible to take the wheel.” – Bill Gates