Random House audio review of Spare by Prince Harry narrated by the author

Today I'm excited to share my review of Spare by Prince Harry. Like many I have watched him grow up under the flash of the paparazzi's bulb, but now I get the real story and what it was really like growing up the Spare.
Enjoy!

ASIN: B0BJ4JGQGS
Publisher: Random House Audio
Release Date: 01-10- 2023
Length: 15 hours-39minutes
Source: Purchase Chirpbooks
Buy It: Audible/Chirpbooks

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Discover the global phenomenon that tells an unforgettable story of love, loss, and healing.

“Compellingly artful . . . [a] blockbuster memoir.”—The New Yorker

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror. As Princess Diana was laid to rest, billions wondered what Prince William and Prince Harry must be thinking and feeling—and how their lives would play out from that point on.

For Harry, this is that story at last.

Before losing his mother, twelve-year-old Prince Harry was known as the carefree one, the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir. Grief changed everything. He struggled at school, struggled with anger, with loneliness—and, because he blamed the press for his mother’s death, he struggled to accept life in the spotlight.

At twenty-one, he joined the British Army. The discipline gave him structure, and two combat tours made him a hero at home. But he soon felt more lost than ever, suffering from post-traumatic stress and prone to crippling panic attacks. Above all, he couldn’t find true love.

Then he met Meghan. The world was swept away by the couple’s cinematic romance and rejoiced in their fairy-tale wedding. But from the beginning, Harry and Meghan were preyed upon by the press, subjected to waves of abuse, racism, and lies. Watching his wife suffer, their safety and mental health at risk, Harry saw no other way to prevent the tragedy of history repeating itself but to flee his mother country. Over the centuries, leaving the Royal Family was an act few had dared. The last to try, in fact, had been his mother. . . .

For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

#GIVEAWAY Showcase - Notes on a Shipwreck by Davide Enia

Refugees fleeing a home that's no longer safe and heading for an unknown boarder they hope will be, these crossings are too often featured in the headlines and too often end in tragedies. Davide Enia gives a moving personal account of just such a shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa, an island in the south of Italy. My copy of this highly acclaimed memoir is high on my tbr pile and one of my US readers can win one too. Deets below
Enjoy!

ISBN-13: 978-1590519080
Publisher: Other Press
Release Date: 2-19-2019
Length: 256pp
Buy It: Amazon/B&N/Kobo/IndieBound/Audible

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

A moving firsthand account of migrant landings on the island of Lampedusa that gives voice to refugees, locals, and volunteers while also exploring a deeply personal father–son relationship.

On the island of Lampedusa, in the southernmost part of Italy, between Africa and Europe, Davide Enia looks in the faces of those who arrive and those who wait, and tells the story of an individual and collective shipwreck. On one side, a multitude in motion, crossing entire nations and then the Mediterranean Sea under conditions beyond any imagination. On the other, a handful of men and women on the border of an era and a continent, trying to welcome the newcomers. In the middle is the author himself, telling of what actually happens at sea and on land, and his desperate attempt to make sense of it all.

Enia reveals the emotional consequences of this touching and disconcerting reality, especially in his relationship with his father, a recently retired doctor who agrees to travel with him to Lampedusa. Witnessing together the public pain of those who land and those who save them from death, alongside the private pain of his uncle’s illness, pushes them to reinvent their relationship, to forge a new and unprecedented dialogue that replaces the silences of the past.

Giveaway is for one Print copy of
Notes on a Shipwreck US ONLY
Please Use Rafflecopter form to enter
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#GIVEAWAY Review of (Must Read) Junkie Love: A Story of Recovery and Redemption Interview with author Joe Clifford

I've had the pleasure of welcoming award winning author Joe Clifford (Jay Porter series) to the blog in the past but today we get up close and personal exploring his memoir about his time as an addict.
A big shout out to Joe's Publicist Author/Guide for supplying me with the review copy plus offering an author signed copy for a #Giveaway here. Details below!
The interview and the book is not for the feint hearted but should be a mandatory read for every student from middle school to high school.
Learn and enjoy!

ISBN-13: 978-1946050113
Publisher: Vagabondage Press LLC; 2nd ed. edition
Release Date: 9-26-2018
Length: 266PP
Source: Publicist/author for review
Buy It: Amazon/Kobo/B&N

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

Joe Clifford didn't start drinking beer until he was almost twenty years old. By the time he turned twenty-two, he was addicted to methamphetamine; and the heroin wasn't far behind. Soon he'd lose his wife, his job, his home.
Junkie Love follows the roughly ten years Clifford spent wandering the streets of San Francisco and beyond, first as a wannabe rock star, and then as another homeless junkie with his head lost in the stars.
In between are the harrowing events and close calls, the shady characters and the enduring friendships, the redemption and restitution that led Fix Magazine to call Junkie Love "one of top four recovery memoirs" of all time.

Joe and his publicist Author/Guide are sponsoring this giveaway of

One author signed print copy of Junkie Love US ONLY

Please use Rafflecopter form to enter

Good Luck

July #LibraryLoveChallenge - Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

Welcome to the July #LobraryLoveChallenge. The Library Love Challenge is hosted by Angel’s Guilty Pleasures & Brooke Blogs. This month was a non-fiction, a memoir about the decline of the Appalachian culture. 

Enjoy!

ISBN-13: 978-0062300546
Publisher: Harper
Release Date: 6-28-2016
Length: 272pp

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

#Giveaway - Showcase - Remembering Shanghai by Isabel Sun Chao and Claire Chao

Just in time for Mother's Day I'm so pleased to be bringing you a showcase of Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels a memoir about growing up in Shanghai during the glamorous 1930s and 1940s by Isabel Sun Chao and Claire Chao. And I"m so happy to tell you that Ms. Chao's publicist is sponsoring a giveaway. Details below!
Enjoy!

ISBN-13: 9780999393819
Publisher: Chao, LLC
Release Date: 5-1-2018
Length: 308 pp
Buy It: Amazon/B&N/Kobo/IndieBound

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and '40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever.

When Mao comes to power, eighteen-year-old Isabel journeys to Hong Kong, not realizing that she will make it her home--and that she will never see her father again. Meanwhile, the family she has left behind struggles to survive, only to have their world shattered by the Cultural Revolution. Isabel returns to Shanghai fifty years later with her daughter, Claire, to confront their family's past--one they discover is filled with love and betrayal, kidnappers and concubines, glittering pleasure palaces and underworld crime bosses.

Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to vibrant Shanghai to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss and the unpredictable nature of life against the epic backdrop of a nation and a people in turmoil.

The Giveaway is for one print copy
of Remembering Shanghai US ONLY
Please use Rafflecopter form below to enter
Good Luck!