2-sprachiger Lektüreband mit einer Erzählung von Jonathan Frantzen und einer Audio-CD mit dem englischen Text; für Lernende mit guten Vorkenntnissen.

Dear Reader; I have spent the past 52 years forgetting and remembering one small part of one day of my life that has affected me for my entire life. Memories are tucked away, asleep in your mind waiting for some outside stimuli to awaken them. But what happens to a memory when you have been told over and over it was just a bad dream, yet you really, really know it was not? What happens to your mind, what happens to your life? What happens when the memory does awake and surfaces for a brief time and then returns to sleep, waiting for the next stimuli? My story, my life, my thoughts, my insights are revealed in my book, my autobiography. The day was January 19, 1948; the time was very early morning. I was four years old. I got out of bed to go to the bathroom and discovered my father’s body hanging from a rope tied to a pipe over the toilet. He had committed suicide. I remember this very vividly, even though my mother tried to convince me for the rest of my life that I never saw what happened. My mother even went so far as to make imaginary visits to the hospital every week for five months, bringing me a present each time and telling me it was from my father. How could this have been, he was dead, I saw him hanging? My mother was protecting me, and protecting herself from a tragedy she only could deal with by denying its very existence. And, by doing so, denying me the opportunity to grieve and put the tragedy behind me. My young mind could not cope with this confusion, so my response was hostility towards my mother, hostility that must have been so intense, my mother’s only recourse was to have me institutionalized. Most of my past tragedy has been asleep, except for brief periods: when my daughters each turned four years old, and when I turned 43, the age my father ended his life. When my mother died, at age 88, the trauma once again awakened within me and this time I had this inner energy to discover all that I had either forgotten, repressed, did not know and/or did not understand. Please join me on my emotional journey to rediscover my past, including the agonizing return to where I was institutionalized, realizing and facing the fact that even after all these years, I am a survivor of suicide, and I have all the scars that go along with it. I have been driven to tell my story, a story I never shared with anybody until now. The telling all began with my daughters Elisa and Jenny, age 26 and 24, they never knew how their grandfather died. I had never told them for fear that they would consider suicide in a moment of despair. The only way I felt comfortable telling my story was through the written word. Well, the words just kept coming and coming and soon I had a book! I still don’t know where the energy came from, but it did (I like to think that my mother was guiding me). Looking for answers about suicide, I became involved with the American Association of Suicidology. They encouraged me to tell my story at their annual conference in Los Angeles. It was a very emotional experience, but I learned and so did the psychologists, psychiatrists and other survivors–it was an eye-opener few days! Most importantly this book is dedicated to my mother, whose love, courage and strength–even with her unnecessary denial and repression–had conquered all. I know my autobiography will be as rewarding a journey for you, as it finally has been for me. The American Association of Suicidology Publications Committee has placed my book on their recommended reading list. Judy Raphael Kletter

A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”

Don't Forget Your Father was birthed from my own pain with my Father. I realized that as I started the process of publishing this book. Once I had tough times communicating with my own children, I initially panicked. I am thankful that I thought of a way to try to fix the miscommunication via text messages. This seemed to be the best method, at the time, to communicate with my children. I then thought about how sending a message every day for a whole year, 365 days straight, could possibly help them with their day or could do something positive for them. Little did I realize that those same messages helped me and reminded me to reach out to my own Father.

For countless millions, Humphrey Bogart’s screen performances and real-life persona merged to make him one of the world’s most fabled figures—a legend of mythic proportions. Or, as his Sam Spade would have put it—the stuff that dreams are made of. But for his only son, Stephen, eight years old in 1957 when his father died of lung cancer, Humphrey Bogart’s giant shadow was a burden he carried until he finally came to understand the private man behind his father’s public face. And now, in this candid and insightful biography, Stephen Bogart explores and illuminates Humphrey Bogart’s life, work, and relationships as they never have been before. Writing with the encouragement of his famous mother, Lauren Bacall, Stephen calls on his memories, and take full advantage of the extraordinary access he has had to friends and colleagues of his father. The result is an intimate and personal profile of an enigmatic man whose tough image contrasted with very human ambitions and vulnerabilities. It is also a vastly entertaining book, filled with fascinating stories involving Frank Sinatra, Katharine Hepburn, “Swifty” Lazar, John Huston, Stephen Bogart’s stepfather, Jason Robards, and many others. Here is Humphrey Bogart, the pro’s pro on the set and the Hollywood renegade off it. The man’s man, the ladies’ man, the hard worker, and the man who liked to drink too much. The husband in three roller-coaster marriages and finally one perfect match, the proud father and absentee parent, the good friend and even better enemy. Here are eye-witness accounts of his most celebrated public misdeeds and moving testimonies of his most unexpected private moments. And finally, in perhaps the most compelling chapter of this shining saga, here is the close-up of Bogart’s last months, where his courage, dignity, and humor made his most stirring celluloid roles seem pale. Combining the drama of Humphrey Bogart’s life with that of a son whose path of reconciliation first had to move through a very difficult time, this is biography at its best—at once a loving tribute and a fascinating revelation. This ebook edition includes photographs directly from Stephen Bogart's personal collection.

A beautiful and lyrical celebration of fatherhood, My Dad reveals all the little things that one child’s dad does that make him the best dad in the world.

A little boy's father seems so large to him that he needs a ladder to cuddle him and birds nest in his father's hair.

An award-winning poet’s “beautifully written” (The Seattle Times) portrait of an American family and his own coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of his father’s suicide. This memoir “belongs on the special shelves we keep for the books we cannot quite forget” (George Hodgman). The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of secrets. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but unspoken. And on a cold night just before Christmas 1973, long after dinner, the rest of the family asleep, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later, Forhan “excavates both his lost father and a lost era in American history” (Bookpage). At the heart of this “fiercely honest” (Nick Flynn) investigation is Forhan’s father, a man whose crisp suits and gelled hair belied a darkness he could not control, a man whose striking dichotomy embodied the ethos of an era. Weaving together the lives of his ancestors, his parents, and his own coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Forhan paints an “achingly beautiful” (Buffalo News) portrait of a family “in the tradition of Geoffrey Wolff” (Booklist). “Poignant…affecting…Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with warmth, humor, and an admirable lack of bitterness” (Kirkus Reviews). A family history, an investigation into a death, and a stirring portrait of an Irish Catholic childhood, all set against a backdrop of America from the Great Depression to the Ramones, My Father Before Me is “an exquisite example of the power of honesty” (Jeannette Walls), “a wonderfully engrossing book…essential for all parents and children, that is, all people” (Library Journal, starred review).

I only had one rule: don’t fall in love with the cruel prince. I broke it. When the clock struck twelve, I went back to being a servant. He promised to let me go with my heart in pieces...but Grayson Crowne always was king at breaking promises. I refuse to let him lock me in a tower. I have no choice but to take the only out offered me—another cruel prince. Refuge in a man I loathe. Rescued from the man I love. I wanted to forget Grayson, forget Crowne Hall, and hide, however fate has other plans. But if Grayson and I are fated, then our fate is forbidden.Our happily ever after will only end one way...in heartbreak. Forbidden Fate is the third book in the Crowne Point universe. You need to have read Stolen Soulmate to read Forbidden Fate.