Bøger af Alison Leslie Gold

In The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead, award-winning author of Anne Frank Remembered and The Devil's Mistress, Alison Leslie Gold presents the life of nun-cum-artist's model Claude Boule. Inspired by a true story and told in spare, evocative prose, this improbable, color-soaked life arc spans the art of Henri Matisse and Andy Warhol, a convent in 1930s Nice, wartime Lyon, postwar Paris, New York in the dazzling 60s on to millennium's end. The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead explores the abstruse relationship between artist and model: Who transfixes whom? The incidental, often travail-filled, life of Claude Boule - impenetrable and inscrutable - serves as a poignant foil for intimate views into the creative processes and behind-the-scenes life of one of the 20th century's most momentous artists. The brash assemblage of The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead also encompasses diverse uncelebrated but no less vividly tinctured people whose lives were touched - erotically, devoutly, unscrupulously and in other often unpredictable ways - by the model's.

Based on extensive research and supported by a factual armature, this novel of evil takes the reader into the hidden erotic life of Hitler and--as she was affectionately nicknamed--Fraulein Effie. Beyond most nonfiction accounts of that place and period, the author has created a personal life for Hitler and his sycophants to give the reader the look and feel of what it must have been like to dwell in such perdition

A moving recreation of the tortured life of Lucia Joyce, the schizophrenic daughter of James Joyce, follows Lucia's struggle to survive despite the terrifying effects of this devastating mental illness.

When Chiune Sugihara was growing up in Japan, he had never even met a Jewish person. There was no way Chiune could know that he would one day save the lives of thousands of Jews - and become a great hero to the Jewish people. Chiune Sugihara was a diplomat who left Japan to work in Lithuania, a small country in Eastern Europe. Part of his job there was to give people permission to leave the country. At the time, Lithuanian Jews were suffering under Nazi rule, and many hoped to escape before they could be taken to concentration camps. Chiune knew he had to help. Going against the wishes of his boss, Chiune allowed nearly 6,000 Jews to leave Lithuania and escape the Nazis.

Padric McGarry was the surviving twin born in 1925 to the unwed 15-year-old daughter of Irish immigrants. Raped at the age of 7 by an older boy, he learned early during his Bronx childhood to use his wits and good looks to hustle and steal at every opportunity. He eventually did time in twenty prisons across the US, where McGarry improved his criminal skills and snatched moments of comfort with Miss Scarlet and other queens in the "Homo Blocks." The Potato Eater is an unsentimental biography that offers a stark, unembroidered view of the intersection of gay and prison cultures. For this unapologetic and often darkly comical account of a rootless life at the bottom of the heap, award-winning author Alison Leslie Gold drew on interviews she made with McGarry in the 1970s, as well as his letters and his own notes. McGarry died, with two years of sobriety, in a halfway house in San Diego in 1982. From an audio tape made in 1977 in New York City: "I was 16 when I was arrested for corrupting the morals of soldiers and sailors, blocking a public doorway, and disturbing the peace. In prison I began to grow up and learn. I learned how to pick pockets, how to open five kinds of safes, how to forge checks, how to work second story, how to boost. We'd practice there. I learned all the necessary things to spend 20 more years in different prisons. Riker's Island was my Junior High School. Sing Sing and Dannemora State were my High Schools. The chain gang and Leavenworth were my colleges. Immediately I had 'Homosexual, Degenerate, Cock Sucker' stamped on my records so I was rarely in population with the rest of the men. I was kept in segregation with junkie queens, wino queens, booster queens, prick peddlers, drag queens and some men who just preferred to be in the homo block where they were adored and given sexual comfort. Life in segregation with those mad sissies was like being caged with a mass of mad, screaming peacocks."

In this haunting memoir, Alison gives a luminous account of key moments in her life that brought her to be the writer she is: her early activism; her descent into alcoholism; her recovery; her discovery of the power of writing to give a shape and meaning to a life. Found and Lost is both a tender memorial to the extraordinary people in her life.