The Essential Russell Martin is a collection of work by the internationally renowned writer that spans forty years. Collected here are three excerpts from novels and a novella, five articles, and excerpts from seven narrative nonfiction books-all of them published between the years 1983 and 2022. As he describes in the book's introduction, Martin has written often over the years about the work people choose to do and how they go about it. He has written about people with disabilities a number of times and has been lured by the inspired work of artists-painters, musicians, writers-who have achieved monumental creative heights. Both Europe and the New World have captured his attention, and he has always been as interested in history as the present moment. He written about death repeatedly, and once wrote about the young men, most of them actually still boys, who forged a football team that had a transcendent season. When Colorado College awarded him an honorary doctorate, the citation read, in part, "Mr. Martin offers to general audiences precise and accurate, but highly readable, studies of extraordinarily complex issues. He does more: he sees beyond what is already known; he moves beyond synthesis to new insights. His work is disciplined, analytical, and creative. It is also profoundly humane." This is an important retrospective collection of some of the very finest work by one of America's most celebrated writers.
Raising her two sons as a single mother in Washington, D.C., author Eliza Richards struggles to find a way to support her family and give her boys the best life she can. But as they mature, both sons-quite separately from each other-become addicts. The eldest enters recovery in Minnesota, and eventually establishes his own highly successful addiction-recovery services. Her younger son-bright, brimming with life and remarkably charismatic-nonetheless falls into addiction, too, but he cannot escape its hold well into middle age. Despite her son's repeated relapses and apparent determination to destroy his life, his mother never gives up on him-although she is often encouraged to do so. He lives on a chaotic, treacherous, and sometimes tragic knife edge until, somehow, he becomes determined to change. Threads of Grace is a prodigal-son story like no other, the tale of a mother's unbreakable bond with an exasperating son whom she loves deeply. It's a story of heartbreak and faith, desperation and, just possibly, redemption. The author is a retired financial advisor in Washington, and this is her first book. It's one that will make you despair, then profoundly remind you that each of us can always choose hope.
The Denver Broncos' 1986-1987 season was an extraordinary one-the first year in which Hall-of-Fame quarterback John Elway won the NFL's MVP award, the season that finally ended the team's decades-long laughingstock legacy, the year Elway's heroics helped forever secure the team in the hearts of fans throughout "Broncos Country." Back in print at last, this is sports writing at its very best. In The Color Orange, bestselling writer Russell Martin offers a series of reports from the city at the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains, letters posted from a football town during the course of a single season, beginning with the long hot days of training camp in mid-July, climaxing in the emotional tumult of the play-offs in frigid January, and ending in a sun-drenched Pasadena Super Bowl. They are letters concerning an illness called Broncomania, letters about the relationship between the team and its city, its region-focusing on the players who work wearing pads and plastic helmets, who are celebrated or ignored depending on what they have done for Denver lately; on the owner and his administrators and coaches, for whom football is big and serious business; on the beat reporters who cover the team as if the assignment were the State Department, and the television "talent" who stand in front of video cameras to record facile practice-field updates; on the bookies and bettors and the souvenir sellers; and, of course, on the fans-the fans who, over the cascade of years, have spent more money than they care to admit to buy tickets to more games than they care to remember, the fans who surely bleed in blue and orange, who root religiously for the home team, who are affected by its fortunes in ways that are not simple to explain. This is a book about football-how the game on the grass (or on the imitation grass) is sometimes enlarged by us into something mythic, something hugely important.
John Ferrier is the pseudonym of a young neurologist who, having completed residencies and research fellowships at Oxford, Vancouver, Denver, Cornell, and Columbia, returned to his home in a medium-sized Rocky Mountain city to take up private practice. Ferrier, whose recreations range from architecture to jazz, combines a passionate interest in neurological research with the sensitivity and compassion of the best clinicians. For over a year, widely acclaimed writer Russell Martin followed him through the days and ways of his practice. The result is a fascinating picture of the brain and its diseases, a moving account of human courage, and a revealing insight into the practice of modern medicine. Matters Gray and White is science writing at its very best. "A book of fascinating insights into modern medical practices and heartening accounts of individual courage. ... Martin records with uncommon sensitivity and understanding the clinical work and thoughts or a first-rate physician. ... It is excellent." New York Times Book Review "An honest and moving book that covers a wide swatch and leaves us full of awe." Washington Post Book World "Compelling ... Martin doesn't merely isolate cases, he weaves them together with the skill of a novelist." The Denver Post
This is the story of one particular little boy trapped in silence, struggling to regain language. And it is the story of every one of us who uses language in much the same way we breathe: effortlessly, intuitively, taking this gift for granted in our daily lives. In a work that captures the whole universe of language, Russell Martin probes this most profound and complex human trait but never abandons his central concern, always circling back to the troubling question of the speechless child. Investigating the mystery of what went wrong and why, he spins a tale of detection, unearthing disturbing truths and reaching surprising conclusions. In the end, his is a spellbinding drama; a tale of one family's determination to help their child find his way back to words; a story of one school's willingness to make room for this child; a story, too, about big, seemingly insurmountable problems, and small but noble victories. In combining this story, with an elegant inquiry into the totality of language, Martin takes us on a voyage of discovery into the very essence of what makes us human. Moving us with the miracle of language, he tells a tale that is a cause for celebration. "A wholly remarkable book . . . Martin leaves us with a deeper understanding of language itself, a richer appreciation of its promise, and a realization that the ability to communicate is a kind of grace." -The Los Angeles Times "A deeply moving rendering of human beings in adversity. . . Other accounts of the suffering of autism have been published, but few can vie with this one for thoughtfulness, scholarship, and personal accent." -New York Times Book Review "The journey into language is a magical passage for any of us, and Russell Martin's brilliantly observed story of a boy struggling to speak takes us into the latest realms of how and why words come to us, and we to them." -Ivan Doig, author of This House of Sky and English Creek
Russell Martin's remarkable first novel brings to mind the wonderful early books of Larry McMurtry, wherein the gorgeous but unforgiving landscape of the American West is evoked as powerfully and majestically as the characters who inhabit it. Martin's narrator is Jack Healy, a decent man struggling to make sense of the cosmos, and to define his place in it. Growing up in Durango, Colorado, the son of an Episcopal priest, Healy dreamed of journeying to space as an astronaut. As Beautiful Islands begins in 1985, Healy has fulfilled his lifelong ambition, having just returned from a successful space shuttle mission. But there are problems awaiting him back home on terra firma. His marriage has come undone, thanks mostly to the pressures of his career. And his brother, Michael, with whom he was once close, has drifted deeper and deeper into the tortured realm of schizophrenia. In Beautiful Islands, Jack Healy relates his experiences in the difficult year that follows his flight-a year that brings tragedy first to his family, then to the nation, when the shuttle Challenger explodes high above the Florida swamps. It is a year that takes Healy on a very difficult kind of journey from his own voyage in weightless space, a journey that beckons him now toward a reassessment of his life and toward a kind of tentative understanding.
Growing up in a remote valley on a sparsely populated planet, Shevra doesn't remember ever encountering anyone other than her parents and sister. And she longs to explore more of what she is certain lies beyond. But when tragedy thrusts her out into that world, she discovers that it's a hostile place-one filled with warring tribes, roaming slavers, and dangerous, exotic animals. On her long journey to the city of Tantexlo in hopes of finding her missing sister, she learns that she is not the person she has always believed she was. And Shevra discovers her true identity as one of the legendary bird-women. Her story is one of adventure, challenge, discovery, and, ultimately, profound understanding. Shevra's is a remarkable trek, and this is a novel for young adults that is both captivating and rich with insight.
When author Sue Westwind marries at midlife and moves to sixty acres of prairie woodland, she imagines that her life will now be fulfilled in ways she has always longed for. Yet the man she marries is ultimately buffeted by life's cruelties and loses the passion for her that once had assured her their union would always be idyllic.As her husband grows silent and distant both from her and the land they live on, she finds erotic fulfillment in the swells and folds of the earth itself, in trees and creeks, in deer and stones. She awakens to the land erotic, and in her ever-expanding and intimate connection to it, she discovers a kind of earth-based sexuality that rejuvenates her and give her strength to endure.This is a book of profound honesty and self-reflection, and this is writing that is exquisitely lyrical, placing Sue Westwind among the very best writers today whose bedrock subject is land and how we live upon it. If you have ever loved a piece of land-or wanted to-you must read The Land Erotic."In The Land Erotic, we live Sue Westwind's marriage and life with an intensity, a richness and rhythm of language, and a therapist's empathy that brings to mind the thunderclap insights of robust poetry and music. Westwind's erotic connection to her sixty acres of woods and prairie is as sensual as any "ecosexuality" I've read. The "healing erotic touch" of her land-"her partner in the real marriage"-runs parallel with her marriage to her husband, where harsh words "deflated love one micro-puncture at a time." "How do you separate husband and place?" she asks. She trusts the land, where the forest teaches her forgiveness. In this story, we trust her. - Stephen Trimble, author of The Mike File: A Story of Grief and Hope and co-author of The Geography of Childhood"In a deeply personal memoir that is marked by uncommon honesty, Sue Westwind tells the story of the home and family she created on sixty acres of Midwestern woodland with her husband and two daughters. No other writer-female or male-has written about land transformed into lover with this kind of candor and with a lyricism that will take your breath away." - Russell Martin, author of Beethoven's Hair, Out of Silence, and The Sorrow of Archaeology
One hot Colorado afternoon, physician-turned-archaeologist Sarah MacLeish unearths the skeleton of an Ancestral Puebloan girl with a deformed leg. Her efforts to understand something of the long-ago life of that girl confront her with the flaws in her own body and her marriage. Sarah struggles with multiple sclerosis, and she is increasingly persuaded that her husband, archaeologist Harry MacLeish, is profoundly discontented in their childless marriage. Sarah must contend, too, with the question of where she comes from, what her pioneer heritage truly means to her, how she can live up to the values of her grandmother-whose long life is drawing to its inevitable close-and whether she has both the power and the will to shape the days that remains to her. Employing archeology as both subject and metaphor, The Sorrow of Archaeology is a provocative and always lyrical novel whose characters grapple with the deepest human questions: How can we know who we really are? What is best for us? How do we construct satisfying narratives of our own lives out of the broken materials fate hands us? Set near Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, where the author grew up and lived for many years, it is a novel rich with emotional, medical, archaeological, and cultural truths.
On April 26, 1937, in the late afternoon of a busy market day in the Basque town of Gernika in northern Spain, the German Luftwaffe began the relentless bombing and machine-gunning of buildings and villagers. Three-and-a-half hours later, the village lay in ruins, its population decimated. This act of terror and unspeakable cruelty outraged the world and one man in particular, Pablo Picasso. The renowned artist, an expatriate living in Paris, reacted immediately to the devastation in his homeland by creating the canvas that would become widely considered one of the greatest artworks of the twentieth century-Guernica. Weaving themes of conflict and redemption, of the horors of war and of the power of art to transfigure tragedy, Russell Martin follows this monumental work from its fevered creation through itsjourney across decades and continents. "Absorbing . . . Picasso's War is a fetching and well-crafted account of Pablo Picasso's huge and astounding painting, Guernica."-Los Angeles Times "Refreshingly original . . . Martin is above all a first-rate investigator [who] deftly weaves together world and art history."-The Boston Globe "A fascinating and lively read."-The Denver Post"An engrossing story of a landmark work of art . . . Martin is, first and foremost, a consummate storyteller." -Kirkus Reviews
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
