The Eccentropedia

The Eccentropedia PDF Author: Chris Mikul
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1909394017
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
An A-Z of eccentrics! 250 true stories of the most original and outrageous people on earth, from bad poets to transsexual evolutionary theorists this encyclopedic guide covering ancient times to the present, includes reams of material never seen in book form before. Famous eccentrics like King Ludwig, Salvador Dalí and Howard Hughes rub shoulders with a host of lesser-known, but equally colorful, characters in these -- mostly -- life-affirming stories. There are unsuspected parallels and connections throughout creating an alternative, off-kilter history of the world.

The Eccentropedia

The Eccentropedia PDF Author: Chris Mikul
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1909394017
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Get Book

Book Description
An A-Z of eccentrics! 250 true stories of the most original and outrageous people on earth, from bad poets to transsexual evolutionary theorists this encyclopedic guide covering ancient times to the present, includes reams of material never seen in book form before. Famous eccentrics like King Ludwig, Salvador Dalí and Howard Hughes rub shoulders with a host of lesser-known, but equally colorful, characters in these -- mostly -- life-affirming stories. There are unsuspected parallels and connections throughout creating an alternative, off-kilter history of the world.

My Favourite Dictators

My Favourite Dictators PDF Author: Chris Mikul
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1909394718
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
“I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets, but it’s what the people want.” — Saparmurat Niyazov, dictator of Turkmenistan Dictators may be among the worst people in history, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t laugh at them. In My Favourite Dictators, Chris Mikul tells the stories of eleven of the twentieth century’s most colourful and reviled human beings, including Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Muammar Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il. In each case, he examines the political backgrounds to their rise to power and eventual downfall, but the focus here is on the personalities, peculiarities and private lives of these very strange men. You’ll be amazed and appalled by their effortless cruelties, voracious sexual appetites, absurd personality cults, ostentatious uniforms, promotion of dreadful art and pretensions to being great writers – not to mention their terrible taste in interior decoration.

Bizarrism II

Bizarrism II PDF Author: Chris Mikul
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1909394491
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Bizarrism II collects further tales of high weirdness from around the world, including: • The curious death of Sherlock Holmes scholar Richard Lancelyn Green. • Baroness Eloise de Bosquet and the mystery of Floreana • The strange odyssey of William Seabrook – writer, adventurer, cannibal. • JLB Smith’s obsessive search for the coelacanth. • The cult that promised eternal life. • The unexpectedly appalling story of Madalyn Murray O’Hair and the American Atheists. • Leonard Lawson – comic book artist and killer. • Padre Pio, Italy’s celebrity stigmatic. • The strange fate of Napoleon’s penis and other illustrious male members. • Ferdinand Sauerbruch – the senile surgeon. • Murder and mayhem among the Hare Krishnas. • The enduring enigma of ‘Somerton Man’. Mikul brings these stories to life in meticulously researched accounts that will amuse, appal and intrigue, and leave you marvelling at the infinite strangeness of human beings.

Bizarrism Vol 1

Bizarrism Vol 1 PDF Author: Chris Mikul
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1909394335
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Bizarrism is a collection of strange-but-true tales, featuring a grand parade of eccentrics, visionaries, crackpots, cult leaders, artists, theorists and outsiders of every stripe. First published in 1999, this new, fully revised and expanded edition revisits a host of unique individuals, including: William Chidley, who believed that, when it comes to sex, we’ve all been making a terrible mistake; Arthur Cravan, who combined poetry with boxing; Slim Gaillard, jazz singer and dispenser of ‘vout’; William Lindsay Gresham, author of the classic noir novel Nightmare Alley; Rosaleen Norton, Australia’s most notorious witch; Harry Crosby, poet, sun worshipper and the best looking corpse of 1929; Reginal Levgiac, author of the mysterious pamphlet Drugs Virus Germs. In writing their stories, Mikul does not judge, but instead celebrates these characters for their fabulous weirdness. For him, they are the “beacons of shining if erratic brilliance in a world of sensible conformity”. The world would be a poorer place without them.

Bizarrism

Bizarrism PDF Author: Chris Mikul
Publisher: Headpress
ISBN: 9781900486064
Category : Alternative lifestyles
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
A funny and entertaining look at outlandish ideas, wacky religious cults and the extremes of human beliefs, both in Australia and overseas. It is a celebration of strange and eccentric lives, with an emphasis on unsung Australian eccentrics, bringing together the best ten years of "Bizarrism" magazine.

Masterpiece

Masterpiece PDF Author: Nancy West
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538134489
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
"The definitive guide for scholars and fans alike to all things Masterpiece and Mystery!" Library Journal, Starred Review On a wintry night in 1971, Masterpiece Theatre debuted on PBS. Fifty years later, America’s appetite for British drama has never been bigger. The classic television program has brought its fans protagonists such as The Dowager Countess and Ross Poldark and series that include Downton Abbey and Prime Suspect. In Masterpiece: America's 50-Year-Old Love Affair with British Television Drama, Nancy West provides a fascinating history of the acclaimed program. West combines excerpts from original interviews, thoughtful commentary, and lush photography to deliver a deep exploration of the television drama. Vibrant stories and anecdotes about Masterpiece’s most colorful shows are peppered throughout, such as why Benedict Cumberbatch hates Downton Abbey and how screenwriter Daisy Goodwin created a teenage portrait of Queen Victoria after fighting with her daughter about homework. Featuring an array of color photos from Masterpiece’s best-loved dramas, this book offers a penetrating look into the program’s influence on television, publishing, fashion, and its millions of fans.

Blood+Death

Blood+Death PDF Author: John Lee Brook
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 190939422X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The White Sister... The Bony Lady... The Godmother... The Pretty Girl... This is Santa Muerte, personification of death. A veiled skeleton with an unquenchable thirst for destruction, Santa Muerte is Mexico’s grim and vengeful goddess. She is worshipped by outcasts and sinners, those for whom the traditional Christian deities of Jesus and the Virgin Mary have no place. For the notorious drug cartels, Santa Muerte is venerated as the saint who does not judge. She provides divine protection against authority and from rival gangs, demanding human sacrifice in return. The cult of Santa Muerte has become inextricably linked to the Mexican cartels over the past decade, resulting in barbaric rituals that have escalated the tide of violence across the streets. Bodies of cartel members are executed en masse at Santa Muerte shrines, and rumors abound of even worse atrocities in the name of magical protection. This book is the story of unholy alliance, of drug gangs and Santa Muerte, and a galvanic passion for blood and death.

Never Be Sane

Never Be Sane PDF Author: Hannah Hightman
Publisher: Blurb Inc.
ISBN: 1389027074
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
Never Be Sane is a monograph focusing on young people who did something different with their youth, despite adolescence usually being the time when people begin to become what society wants them to be. This book profiles the antics and accomplishments of 18 people during their teens/youth (including Tavi Gevinson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Aaron Swartz, Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, and Akiane Kramarik) in an effort to promote individuality in the face of conformity. It features brief excerpts on each person with accompanying visuals and ink sketches.

Small Town Skateparks

Small Town Skateparks PDF Author: Clint Carrick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909394773
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
For many Americans who grew up in a small town, childhood and adolescence revolved around the skatepark. As time passes, however, these people drift away from skateboarding and the spaces where they learned to do it. Part memoir, part travelogue, part essay, Small Town Skateparks is the story of an adventure to discover the role skateparks play in such lives and the role they played in the author's own. Clint Carrick grew up at the skatepark. Every day of the summer, he and his friends would loaf at the dilapidated park with warped plywood ramps strewn with rusty nails. They were the outsiders of the town, or at least thought of themselves that way. They wore jeans and ripped skate shoes and felt free in their special hang out, the skatepark, where they had their own language, their own heroes, and their own views of the world. In this setting they matured from children awestruck of high school kids to bored young men desperate to get out. Clint, now an adult, rekindles these forgotten memories as he drives across the country visiting unremarkable skateparks in America's small towns. Why is he drawn to these skateparks? What is their charm? How does the skatepark function as an institution, and what is the indelible mark it leaves on those who grow in its womb? As he makes his way further west, Clint relearns how to skate. He chats with locals, crashes, bleeds, and hears a lot of stories that sound like his own. The rust begins to wear off, but questions remain. Can someone who left skating behind rediscover the activity that defined his youth? Can someone who abandoned skateboarding make the skatepark once again his home?

Homer & Langley

Homer & Langley PDF Author: E.L. Doctorow
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588368971
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
“Beautiful and haunting . . . one of literature’s most unlikely picaresques, a road novel in which the rogue heroes can’t seem to leave home.”—The Boston Globe SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Booklist Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers—wars, political movements, technological advances—and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves. Praise for Homer & Langley “Masterly.”—The New York Times Book Review “Doctorow paints on a sweeping historical canvas, imagining the Collyer brothers as witness to the aspirations and transgressions of 20th century America; yet this book’s most powerfully moving moments are the quiet ones, when the brothers relish a breath of cool morning air, and each other’s tragically exclusive company.”— O: The Oprah Magazine “A stately, beautiful performance with great resonance . . . What makes this novel so striking is that it joins both blindness and insight, the sensual world and the world of the mind, to tell a story about the unfolding of modern American life that we have never heard in exactly this (austere and lovely) way before.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Wondrous . . . inspired . . . darkly visionary and surprisingly funny.” —The New York Review of Books “Cunningly panoramic . . . Doctorow has packed this tale with episodes of existential wonder that cpature the brothers in all their fascinating wackiness.”—Elle