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Stolen Lives

Malika Oufkir has spent virtually her whole life as a prisoner. Born in 1953, the eldest daughter of General Oufkir, the King of Morocco's closest aide, Malika was adopted by the King at the age of five, and was brought up as the companion to his little daughter. Spending most of her childhood and adolescence in the seclusion of the court harem, Malika Oufkir was one of the most eligible heiresses in the kingdom, surrounded by luxury and extraordinary privilege.
Then on August 16th, 1972, her father was arrested and executed after an attempt to assassinate the King. Malika Oufkir, her five siblings, and her mother were immediately imprisoned in a penal colony. After fifteen years, the last ten of which they spent locked up in solitary cells, the Oufkir children managed to dig a tunnel with their bare hands and make a daring escape, though they were recaptured after only five days of freedom. Malika Oufkir was finally able to leave Morocco and begin a new life in exile in 1996.
Stolen Lives is a heart-rending account of resilience in the face of extreme deprivation, of the courage and even humor with which one family faced their tormented fate. A shocking true story, it is hard to comprehend that it could have happened in our own times.
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir
ISBN: 1413226124

Creative Habit

Creativity is not a gift from the gods, says Twyla Tharp, bestowed by some divine and mystical spark. It is the product of preparation and effort, and it's within reach of everyone who wants to achieve it. All it takes is the willingness to make creativity a habit, an integral part of your life: In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.
In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp takes the lessons she has learned in her remarkable thirty-five-year career and shares them with you, whatever creative impulses you follow - whether you are a painter, composer, writer, director, choreographer, or, for that matter, a businessperson working on a deal, a chef developing a new dish, a mother wanting her child to see the world anew.
When Twyla Tharp is at a creative dead end, she relies on a lifetime of exercises to help her get out of the rut, and The Creative Habit contains more than thirty of them to ease the fears of anyone facing a blank beginning and to open the mind to new possibilities.
Twyla Tharp's exercises are practical and immediately doable - for the novice or expert. In "Where's Your Pencil?" she reminds us to observe the world - and get it down on paper. In "Coins and Chaos," she provides the simplest of mental games to restore order and peace. In "Do a Verb," she turns your mind and body into coworkers. In "Build a Bridge to the Next Day," Twyla Tharp shows how to clean your cluttered mind overnight.
To Twyla Tharp, sustained creativity begins with rituals, self-knowledge, harnessing your memories, and organizing your materials. Along the way she leads you by the hand through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts into productive grooves. In her creative realm, optimism rules. An empty room, a bare desk, a blank canvas can be energizing, not demoralizing. And in this inventive, encouraging book, Twyla Tharp shows us how to take a deep breath and begin!
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp
ISBN: 0743235266

Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee

Every night, I hope and pray A dream lover will come my way... For a generation those words evoke memories of a happier, more innocent time, when Bobby Darin electrified America and Sandra Dee was everybody's sweetheart. When they became husband and wife, the marriage looked like the picture-perfect culmination of an American dream. But was it?
In this intensely personal biography the son of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee goes far beyond the ordinary celebrity bio, revealing the real story behind his parents' shining image - their troubled childhoods, up-and-down careers, brief marriage, and tumultuous lives together and apart.
Bobby Cassotto was a manic, fast-talking street kid from New York who scratched and clawed his way into the music business. But his charm was fueled by an illness that he knew would shorten his life and the secret scandal of his true mother's identity.
Sandra Douvan was the sweet, wispy-thin teenage model from New Jersey who seemed to rise to fame without effort. But Sandra had her own dark secrets: a lifelong obsession with food and dieting, and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather. At sixteen she had never been kissed, and found herself in love with twenty-four-year-old Bobby Darin.
Bobby's career was still rising as he restlessly reinvented himself from a pop crooner to an acclaimed actor, music producer, and blockbuster nightclub performer. Twelve years later Bobby was dead, Sandy was beginning a life as a Hollywood shut-in, and America was changed forever.
Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee by Dodd Darin
ISBN: 0446602469

Vera Brittain (1896-1970)

Brittain's pacifist and feminist memoir of the First World War, in which she served as a nurse in London, Malta, and in France at the front, is a classic account of an entire generation marked by fatal idealism and changed by war.
Vera Brittain (1896-1970) grew up in provincial comfort in the north of England. In 1915 Vera abandoned her studies at Oxford to enlist as a nurse in the armed forces. Brittain served throughout the war in London, Malta, and at the front of France. At war's end Vera Brittain devoted herself to the causes of peace and feminism. She wrote twenty-nine books in all, but it was Testament of Youth that established her reputation and made her one of the best-loved writers of her time.
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
ISBN: 0140188444

Women's Ways of Knowing

Drawn from the voices of women of varied backgrounds, Women's Ways of Knowing reveals the unique perspectives from which women view reality and draw conclusions about truth, knowledge, and authority.
An intellectual and political Our Bodies, Ourselves, this book has had significant impact on debates about learning and gender, and will continue to have resonance throughout the fields of education and psychology for years to come.
Women's Ways of Knowing by Mary Field Belenky
ISBN: 0465090990