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In 2002, the reclusive and legendary record producer Phil Spector gave his first interview in twenty-five years to Mick Brown. The day after it was published an actress named Lana Clarkson was shot dead in Spector's LA castle. This is Brown's odyssey into the strange life and times of Phil Spector. Beginning with that fateful meeting in Spector's home and going on to explore his colourful and extraordinary life and career, including the unfolding of the Clarkson case, this is one of the most bizarre and compelling stories in pop history.
All pike anglers need a knowledge of their quarry and the best methods for catching it. This book provides both. All aspects and methods of pike fishing are covered, including live baiting, dead baiting, lure fishing, river fishing, and piking in all types of stillwater; and since the book is divided into the months of one year, each method is adapted to take account of seasonal conditions. For the novice piker, there is a treasure trove of knowledge and advice; for the expert, there are scores of tips for refining technique, and ultimately, for putting more fish in the net.
This is a narrative recounting a spiritual voyage taking the author around the world in a quest for the divine. A trail of chance, synchronicity, divine providence and the occasional railway and airline schedule, leads Brown from the extraordinary figure of the 19th-century occult adventuress Madame Blavatsky, via the philosopher Krishnamurti, to the genial Scottish clairvoyant who claims that the Christ of the age is alive and well and living in London. In India, he encounters the miracle-working Sai Baba, and discusses reincarnation with the world's most revered spiritual figure, the Dalai Lama. In Germany, he joins the pilgrims who kneel at the feet of the young Indian Woman, Mother Meera, believing she is divine. In a tiny backwoods church in Tennessee, he examines the "Crosses of Light" which are held as evidence of Christ's imminent return to Earth.;Mick Brown is the author of "Richard Branson, The Inside Story" and "American Heartbeat: Travels from Woodstock to San Jose by Song Title".
In January 2000, two Ambassador taxis twisted their way up the narrow road leading towards Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills of northern India - the home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama. In one taxi was a fourteen-year-old boy, the 17th Karmapa, one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism. The boy's arrival in Dharamsala was the culmination of an extraordinary escape which had brought him 900 miles across the Himalayas, in conditions of high danger, from the monastery in Tibet where he had lived since he was seven years old. Fascinated by this charismatic young figure, Mick Brown travelled to Dharamsala to meet him, and found himself drawn into the labyrinthine - not to say surreal - web of intrigue surrounding the 17th Karmapa's recognition and young life.
A guide to 'Performance, a 1970s film in which outrageous characters drift around a huge house in Notting Hill - with a heady concoction of love, drugs and gangsters. It was directed by Nicolas Roeg, and starred Mick Jagger and James Fox.
Antietam (Andy) Brown - named for the great-great-grandfather who died on that Civil War battleground - was an overgrown ten-year-old when he killed his abusive foster father and the teenager who tried to rape him. Now, after 7 years in reform school, he is presumably free to make a new start as a student at Conestoga High School.
"Can justice be healing? Can crime victims find a new peace through transformative processes that include victims, offenders and community in creative solutions that enable all to grow? We can "turn irritation into iridescence," find ways to take the hard blows of life, and use the very power of our pain to grow from the experience, and create new hope beyond crime or other trauma. Forgiveness is an untapped force in our revenge-oriented culture. These stories show that forgiveness is not condoning or forgetting, or failing to set limits. Forgiveness is recognizing and acknowledging all that was wrong, but refusing to be destroyed by it, and refusing to be drawn into a cycle of hatred and bitterness. We can change our criminal justice system to include transformative methods. We can change our world to one with greater social and economic justice. For readers who yearn for realistic hope in these troubled times, this is a must read." --
In the summer of 1964, while a military coup was taking place and tanks were rolling through the streets of Algiers, Robert Irwin set off for Algeria in search of Sufi enlightenment. There he entered a world of marvels and ecstasy, converted to Islam and received an initiation as a faqir. He learnt the rituals of Islam in North Africa and he studied Arabic in London. He also pursued more esoteric topics under a holy fool possessed of telepathic powers. A series of meditations on the nature of mystical experience run through this memoir. But political violence, torture, rock music, drugs, nightmares, Oxbridge intellectuals and first love and its loss are all part of this strange story from the 1960s.
The acclaimed writer shares an intimate portrait of his former mentor V.S. Naipaul in this memoir of their thirty-year friendship and sudden falling out. Paul Theroux was a young aspiring writer when he met the legendary V.S. Naipaul in Uganda in 1966. There began a friendship that would span continents as both men ascended the ranks of literary stardom. Naipaul’s early encouragement of Theroux’s talent had a profound impact on him—yet the apprenticeship was not always easy. This heartfelt and revealing account of Theroux's thirty-year friendship with Naipaul explores the unique effect each writer had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of how one develops as a writer and how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life. A New York Times Notable Book