As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1567923925

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"I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vain-glorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far." Despite this romantic and optimistic opening, what Lee finds is the most primitive and feudal country in Europe, a peninsula untouched by the modern world, a land of labor without dignity, a church devoid of compassion, and a country ripe for revolutionary change.

The Autobiographical Trilogy

The Autobiographical Trilogy
Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2018-05-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1504053915

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A young man’s journey—from the international bestselling account of his idyllic childhood in rural England to “a poetic memoir” of the Spanish Civil War (The Washington Post). In his acclaimed autobiographical trilogy, “one of the great writers of the twentieth century” presents a vivid portrait of coming of age in Europe between the wars (The Independent). Beginning with the international bestselling, lyrical memoir of his childhood in the Cotswolds, Laurie Lee follows up with a fascinating travel narrative of crossing England and Spain on foot, and brings the story to a climax with a gripping chronicle of his part in the Spanish Civil War. Cider with Rosie: International Bestseller Three years old and wrapped in a Union Jack to protect him from the sun, Laurie Lee arrived in the village of Slad in the final summer of the First World War. The cottage his mother had rented had neither running water nor electricity, but it was surrounded by a lovely half-acre garden and big enough for the seven children in her care. In this verdant valley tucked into the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, Lee learned to look at life with a painter’s eye and a poet’s heart—qualities of vision that, decades later, would make him one of England’s most cherished authors. “A remarkable book . . . dazzling.” —The New York Times As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: At age nineteen, Lee set out to walk the hundred miles from Slad to London, carrying only a change of clothes, his violin, a tent, a tin of biscuits, and some cheese. With a detour of an extra hundred miles to see the sea for the first time, Lee hopped a ferry to Spain because he knew enough Spanish to ask for a glass of water, and wandered the country for a year on foot. In one of the finest travel narratives of the twentieth century, Lee offers an unforgettable portrait of Spain on the eve of its civil war. “The vivid, sensitive, irresistibly readable story of what happened after [Lee] left home.” —The Daily Mail A Moment of War: Returning to a divided Spain in the bitter December of 1937 by crossing the Pyrenees from France, the idealistic young Lee came face to face with the reality of war, in this New York Times Notable Book. The International Brigade he sought to join was far from the gallant fighting force he’d envisioned but instead a collection of misfits without proper leadership or purpose. In a sudden confrontation with the enemy, he was left feeling anything but heroic. Captured more than once as a spy, Lee was lucky to escape with his life. “Written with brilliant economy and belongs to the remarkable literature which the Spanish Civil War inspired.” —The Independent

My Midsummer Morning: Rediscovering a Life of Adventure

My Midsummer Morning: Rediscovering a Life of Adventure
Author: Alastair Humphreys
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-05-30
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0008331839

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A Financial Times Summer Book of 2019 Seasoned adventurer Alastair Humphreys pushes himself to his very limits – busking his way across Spain with a violin he can barely play.

A Moment of War

A Moment of War
Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2014-06-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 149764139X

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A memoir of the Spanish Civil War with “the plainness of Orwell but the metaphorical soaring of a poem . . . An extraordinary book” (The New York Times Book Review). In December 1937 I crossed the Pyrenees from France—two days on foot through the snow. I don’t know why I chose December; it was just one of a number of idiocies I committed at the time. Such was Laurie Lee’s entry into the Spanish Civil War. Six months after the Nationalist uprising forced him to leave the country he had grown to love, he returned to offer his life for the Republican cause. It seemed as simple as knocking on a farmhouse door in the middle of the night and declaring himself ready to fight. It would not be the last time he was almost executed for being a spy. In that bitter winter in a divided Spain, Lee’s youthful idealism came face to face with the reality of war. The International Brigade he sought to join was not a gallant fighting force, but a collection of misfits without proper leadership or purpose. Boredom and bad food and false alarms were as much a part of the experience of war as actual battle. And when the decisive moment finally came—the moment of him or the enemy—it left Lee feeling the very opposite of heroic. The final volume in Laurie Lee’s acclaimed autobiographical trilogy—preceded by Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning—is a clear-eyed and vital snapshot of a young man, and a proud nation, at a historic crossroads.

Red Sky at Sunrise

Red Sky at Sunrise
Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 544
Release: 1993-10-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0141927372

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'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling lights and sounds of my first footings on earth in a steep Cotswold valley some three miles long. For nineteen years this was the limit of my world, then one midsummer morning I left home and walked to London and down the blazing length of Spain during the innocent days of the early thirties. Never had I felt so fat with time, so free to go where I would. Then such indulgence was suddenly broken by the savage outbreak of the Civil War . . .' - Laurie Lee

Room 15

Room 15
Author: Charles Harris
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2020-07-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504070453

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A twisty psychological thriller with “the ingenious structure and leaps in time and memory of a Christopher Nolan movie” from an award-winning director (Camden New Journal). Ross Blackleigh is on trial for four crimes which he insists he didn’t commit. A detective inspector and a thoughtful self-reflective man, he goes against his counsel’s advice and takes the stand in court. This is his story. Ross found himself wandering the streets one night, bleeding from the head and unable to remember the past year and a half. But before he could make sense of it, he was summoned to a crime scene where a nurse had been brutally murdered. His amnesia unnerved him and, fearing the worst, Ross allowed himself to be taken to hospital, only to be viciously attacked by a stranger with a knife. Suspecting that the attack was connected with the nurse’s murder and that his own police colleagues were behind it, Ross set out on two parallel investigations: one into the killing and the other into his own mind. But when he digs into his own psyche, he is scared by what he finds . . . Is Ross being set up or is something far more disturbing behind the killings? “Profoundly creepy in the best way, and the desperation of the haunted protagonist makes it a compellingly nightmarish journey.” —Life in Sci-Fi “These changes of gear, the mix of brutal realism and a sense of darker, inexplicable forces are what give Room 15—I won’t reveal the significance of the title—its power, as the novel hurtles back to the courtroom and the jury’s verdict.” —Camden New Journal

Cider with Rosie

Cider with Rosie
Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2003-07-28
Genre: Authors, English
ISBN: 9780099455738

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A wonderfully vivid memoir of Laurie Lee's childhood and youth in a remote Cotswold village.

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I Walked Out One Evening
Author: W. H. Auden
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1995-08-08
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0679761705

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W. H. Auden once defined light verse as the kind that is written by poets who are democratically in tune with their audience and whose language is straightforward and close to general speech. Given that definition, the 123 poems in this collection all qualify; they are as accessible as popular songs yet have the wisdom and profundity of the greatest poetry. As I Walked Out One Evening contains some of Auden's most memorable verse: "Now Through the Night's Caressing Grip," "Lullaby: Lay your Sleeping Head, My Love," "Under Which Lyre," and "Funeral Blues." Alongside them are less familiar poems, including seventeen that have never before appeared in book form. Here, among toasts, ballads, limericks, and even a foxtrot, are "Song: The Chimney Sweepers," a jaunty evocation of love, and the hilarious satire "Letter to Lord Byron." By turns lyrical, tender, sardonic, courtly, and risqué, As I Walked Out One Evening is Auden at his most irresistible and affecting.

The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War
Author: Stanley G. Payne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2012-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139536249

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This book presents a new history of the most important conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War. It describes the complex origins of the conflict, the collapse of the Spanish Republic and the outbreak of the only mass worker revolution in the history of Western Europe. Stanley Payne explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the complex web of republican politics, while also examining the development of Franco's counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines why the conflict provoked such strong reactions at the time, and long after. The book also explains the military history of the war and its place in the history of military development, the non-intervention policy of the democracies and the role of German, Italian and Soviet intervention, concluding with an analysis of the place of the war in European affairs, in the context of twentieth-century revolutionary civil wars.

The Hello Girls

The Hello Girls
Author: Elizabeth Cobbs
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2019-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674237439

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In 1918 the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France to help win World War I. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges these patriotic young women faced in a war zone where male soldiers resented, wooed, mocked, saluted, and ultimately celebrated them. Back on the home front, they fought the army for veterans’ benefits and medals, and won.