![]() Five years later, in 2006, he was playing Chris Gardner. In 2001 he played the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali. Will Smith has only starred in two biographies. ![]() After 30 years in the finance industry, a heartbreaking loss led him to take his own advice - to pursue his own version of happiness. ![]() Years after the film’s conclusion, Gardner turned away from riches, and away the successful business he’d developed. And the man behind the story is Chris Gardner.ĭespite his rags to riches tale, money isn’t everything for Gardner. Does the story sound familiar? The movie is The Pursuit of Happyness. A Ferrari once owned by sporting legend Michael Jordan.īefore the wealth and success, though, the salesman spent a year homeless on the streets of San Francisco, with his toddler son, moving between homeless shelters, park benches, and public toilets. Instinctually the salesman approached the man with two questions: “ What do you do, and how do you do it?” Those two questions sparked a chain of events that led to the salesman’s rapid rise in fortune, a bestselling memoir, a Hollywood film about his life, millions in the bank, and his own Ferrari. ![]() ![]() Stirred by what he saw, he decided to approach the car’s owner, who was dressed to impress in a tailor-fit suit. As the salesman was walking by, the car pulled up to the curb. It was a red Ferrari that mesmerized a 27-year-old struggling salesman one day in the early 80s, in a parking lot outside of San Francisco General Hospital. ![]()
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![]() ![]() More and more people left their villages to look for work. ![]() As the monasteries had also helped provide food for the poor, this added to the problem. The closing down of the monasteries in the 1530s created even more unemployment. When large landowners changed from arable to sheep farming, unemployment increased rapidly. Unemployment was a serious problem during this period. If any able-bodied man or woman, who did not own land or carry on a recognised profession or was a trader in merchandise, was found outside his native parish and could not account for his presence there, the local JP was to send him to the nearest market town, where he was to be tied naked to the end of a cart and beaten with a whip. A law passed in 1530 stated that people who were too old or ill to work could apply to a local JP for a licence to beg but any vagabond who begged without a licence was to be severely punished. During his reign he told Parliament to pass several acts against vagabonds (people wandering around the country looking for work). Ridley's main criticism of Henry concerns his treatment of the poor. In his book, Henry VIII (1984), the historian, Jasper Ridley, compared the crimes of Henry VIII with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. ![]() ▼ References ▼ Spartacus Blog Was Henry VIII as bad as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin? ![]() ![]() Stephen Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians. Indeed, there are nearly 200 film references in this novel, hiding in plain sight, and they are a joy to encounter for horror film aficionados and novices alike. ![]() Reviewers in TIME magazine write that “Jones takes grief, gentrification, and abuse to task in a tale that will terrify you and break your heart.” My Heart Is a Chainsaw is a meta-narrative homage to classic slasher films like Scream and Friday the 13th. High school senior Jade Daniels is the novel’s Indigenous protagonist, a slasher film fan living in Proofrock, Idaho, where Indigenous displacement and gentrification are anything but terrors of the past. This week, Lauren chats with Stephen Graham Jones, author of My Heart Is a Chainsaw (Gallery Books, Saga Press). ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Magazine, Nerve, Best American Erotica, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and tons of other places. Tan is the author of many books, including the ground-breaking erotic short story collections Black Feathers (HarperCollins), White Flames (Running Press), and Edge Plays (Circlet Press), and the erotic romances Slow Surrender, Slow Seduction, and Slow Satisfaction (Hachette/Forever), The Prince’s Boy (Circlet Press), The Hot Streak (Riverdale Avenue Books), and the Magic University series (Riverdale Avenue Books). Her BDSM romance novel Slow Surrender (Hachette/Forever, 2013) won both the 2013 RT Reviewers Choice Award in Erotic Romance and the Maggie Award for Excellence, and Tan herself was awarded the RT Career Achievement Award in Erotic Fiction and the RT Pioneer Award in Genre Fiction for Erotica at the 2015 RT Booklovers Convention in Dallas. Various official “bios” for publication purposes:Ĭlick for 300 dpiCecilia Tan is “simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature,” according to Susie Bright. Also archived: Awards | Interviews | Media Appearances ![]() ![]() ![]() Not content to rest on her hard -earned laurels, Steel continues to write with the same vim and vigor that she did 50 years ago - 2020 alone has seen seven new titles. Having sold over 800 million copies, she is one of, if not the bestselling author alive today. Regardless of what critics have to say, the numbers simply don’t lie. ![]() Pulling staggering twenty-hour writing shifts when she’s working on a new project is just another testament to her exceptionality, and we have this strict regimen to thank for the 190 books ranging from children’s books to poetry to fiction and nonfiction that Steel has published. The fact that Steel still writes all her novels on a manual typewriter should be enough to tell you she is no ordinary writer- and it’s safe to say she has led no ordinary life. With an arsenal of silk-stocking protagonists and life-changing crises up her sleeve, Steel has mastered the formula for the perfect love story, with all the twists and turns you could wish for. One only has to think of the romance genre for Danielle Steel’s name to immediately spring to mind. ![]() The 15 Best Danielle Steel Books in Order of Publication ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Their friendship endured, providing a lifetime of material. Weschler ends by speculating that Sacks altered neurological practice itself through his attentive compassion for the patients who feature in his stories." -Barbara Kiser, Nature "In genre terms, neither fish nor fowl but, rather, some other odd, often delightful animal." -The New Yorker "In 1981, Lawrence Weschler, a New Yorker staff writer, began interviewing the brilliant neurologist Oliver Sacks. exulting over horseshoe crabs and chunks of Iceland spar. This is Sacks at full blast: on endless ward rounds, observing his post-encephalitic patients. Compellingly, Weschler intertwines Sacks's searching empathy with his sheer strangeness." -Daniel Bergner, The New York Times Book Review " engrossing biographical memoir. Weschler resurrects the interviews he did in the early '80s with Sacks's friends and colleagues, and with Sacks himself, who illuminates his insistence not merely on the humanity of patients who suffered everything from extreme Tourette's to severe amnesia, but also on something spiritual within them. ![]() ![]() "Provide striking glimpses into a remarkable life. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() We wandered around for a while an eventually stopped at a little ramen shop for lunch. Outside of the temple there were long streets of stalls selling all kinds of souvenirs. The temple area was packed with people, many lighting incense sticks or tossing coins into a big trough in front of the Buddha statue. We arrived in the city around noon on Saturday and immediately set out to see the Sensoji Temple which was within walking distance of our hostel. It seemed a shame to live so nearby (less than a 2-hr flight) for two years and never make it to the biggest city in the world. We’ve been to Osaka and Kyoto in the past, but we’d never been further than the airport in Tokyo. ![]() This is our final holiday/day off before the end of our contract in August and was therefore our last opportunity to travel, so even though it was only a few days, we headed to Tokyo to take advantage of them. ![]() Buddha’s birthday is celebrated according to the Lunar Calendar which means it’s on a different day each year, so it really was a happy coincidence that it fell on a Monday, creating a long weekend for us government employees. Usually, Korean holidays don’t coincide with American ones, but this past weekend (Memorial Day in the US) happened to be the holiday celebrating Buddha’s Birthday in Asia. ![]() ![]() ![]() In October 2022, Kay's final illustrated edition was published. The fourth one, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was published in 2019. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was published in 2016, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 2017. It has illustrations found in the first four illustrated editions, and new, unseen sketches and pieces by Kay in diary form, each day celebrating an event or anniversary in the Harry Potter books. Jim Kay illustrated the first four books in the Harry Potter series so far, with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone being published back in 2015. In October 2021, Harry Potter: A Magical Year, The Illustrations of Jim Kay was put out. He later brought in guest collaborator Neil Packer to help complete the illustrations. ![]() Kay later stated that he didn't think it would be out until 2022, which was later verified by Wizarding World. It was estimated at the time that the title would be released no earlier than Fall 2021. In May 2020, Jim Kay released a couple of sketches of illustrations for the illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Kay's illustrated Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was published on 8 October, 2019. Kay's illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was published in October 2017. ![]() ![]() Kay's illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was published in 4 October 2016, featuring 115 new colour images. It's the only illustrated edition that has a Kindle edition. The first title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was released on 6 October 2015, featuring over 100 full-colour illustrations. ![]() |