Nero (1853)

Silver Smith

Neil Drysdale

2010 · 328 pages · 2 reviews

Others: Negative

After 250 appearances for Dundee United, Walter Smith was appointed coach of the Scotland Under 18 team in 1978, helping the team to win the European Youth Championship in 1982. This was the start to what has been a long and successful career in both coaching and management, first with the SFA where he acted as assistant manager to Alex Ferguson during the 1986 Mexico World Cup. He enjoyed an illustrious career in management at Rangers, joining the Souness revolution in 1987, winning seven successive league titles, a domestic treble in 1992/93 and winning both the Scottish Cup and the League Cup three times each. Following this stirring success in Scotland, Smith accepted a position across the border in the English Premier League with Everton in 1998, where he was manager for three years, before reuniting with Sir Alex Ferguson as an assistant manager at Manchester Untied in 2004.In December of that year, Smith was appointed manager of the Scottish national team.During his tenure at the helm, Scotland enjoyed their most successful period of international football for several years, rising almost forty places in the World Rankings and earning Smith the "Scot of the Year" award at the prestigious Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland awards in 2006. Midway through the qualifying rounds for Euro 2008, however, and with Scotland leading the group, Smith controversially accepted an offer to quit the SFA for a return to Ibrox in January 2007. Walter Smith is one of the most talked about and respected managers in British football. This insightful biography casts a reflective and analytical eye over his life and career, examining this shrewd professional through the many highs and lows that he has experienced as a player and a manager.

32 third graders and one class bunny

Phillip Done

2005 · 288 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

84, Charing Cross Road

Helene Hanff

1970 · 97 pages · 6 reviews

Others: Overwhelmingly positive

It all began with a letter inquiring about second-hand books, written by Helene Hanff in New York, and posted to a bookshop at 84, Charing Cross Road in London. As Helene's sarcastic and witty letters are responded to by the stodgy and proper bookshop employee Frank Doel, a relationship blossoms into a warm and charming long-distance friendship lasting many years.

A childhood, the biography of a place

Harry Crews

1978 · 177 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews's earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him - and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural south Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay. At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."

A Stolen Life

Jaycee Lee Dugard

2011 · 273 pages · 1 review

Others: Negative

In the summer of 1991 I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother who loved me. I was just like you. Until the day my life was stolen. For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation. On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I don’t think of myself as a victim. I survived. A Stolen Life is my story—in my own words, in my own way, exactly as I remember it.

Agrippina

Emma Southon

2019 · 352 pages · 1 review

Others: Positive

"In her own time, she was recognized as a woman of unparalleled power. Beautiful and intelligent, she was portrayed as alternately a ruthless murderer and helpless victim, the most loving mother and the most powerful woman of the Roman empire, using sex, motherhood, manipulation, and violence to get her way, and single-minded in her pursuit of power for herself and her son, Nero. This book follows Agrippina as a daughter, born in Cologne, to the expected heir to Augustus's throne; as a sister to Caligula who raped his sisters and showered them with honors until they attempted rebellion against him and were exiled; as a seductive niece and then wife to Claudius who gave her access to near unlimited power; and then as a mother to Nero--who adored her until he had her assassinated. Through senatorial political intrigue, assassination attempts, and exile to a small island, to the heights of imperial power, thrones, and golden cloaks and games and adoration, Agrippina scaled the absolute limits of female power in Rome. Her biography is also the story of the first Roman imperial family--the Julio-Claudians--and of the glory and corruption of the empire itself."--Page [2] of cover.