The Girl who Fell from the Sky
After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white. A first novel. Reprint.
The Girl Who Fell
"When new boy in school, Alec, sweeps Zephyr off her feet, their passionate romance takes a dangerous and possessive turn when Alec begins manipulating Zephyr"--
The Girl who Fell Down
An overnight sensation for her 1943 comedic role as "The Girl Who Falls Down" in the groundbreaking musical Oklahoma!, McCracken established the prototype dancer-comedienne, headlining in ballet, stage, film, and television productions before her life was tragically cut short by complications from diabetes. Author Lisa Jo Sagolla draws on extensive interviews with McCracken's friends, family, and colleagues to paint a complex portrait of the petite, blue-eyed, and sprightly entertainer as a woman exploiting her mesmerizing beauty and magnetism to succeed in the man's world of entertainment, yet always retaining the persona of childlike pixie she portrayed on stage. McCracken's comic exuberance and athleticism also epitomized a new ballet form that married the European ideas of aristocratic grace and movement with a uniquely American spirit and style. From her beginnings in Philadelphia and New York, to her meteoric rise to fame, to her life long struggle with the little understood and devastating effects of diabetes, The Girl Who Fell Down chronicles McCracken's spirited yet poignant life, including her training at Balanchine's seminal School of American Ballet, her blossoming as a "ravishing talent" with a "crackerjack dance technique" under Agnes de Mille, her supremacy as a performer, her marriages to novelist Jack Dunphy (who left her for Truman Capote,) and Bob Fosse, and her ultimate diagnosis with heart disease. Touching and inspiring, Sagolla's account describes McCracken's lasting influence through her nurturing of husband Fosse's provocative career, her dramatic coaching of actress Shirley MacLaine, and her inspiration for the many dancer-comediennes that followed -- Gwen Verdon, Carol Haney, and Sandy Duncan, to name a few. Rich with the social and cultural history of a golden age in show business and teeming with colorful choreographers, dancers, and entertainers, this comprehensive and carefully researched biography will introduce Joan McCracken to a new audience of dance enthusiasts.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth
Award-winning filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl Who Fell to Earth is a funny and wry coming-of-age memoir about growing up in between American and Gulf Arab cultures. Part family saga and part personal quest, The Girl Who Fell to Earth traces Al-Maria’s journey to make a place for herself in two different worlds. When Sophia Al-Maria's mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband's desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn't know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she'd only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places. The Girl Who Fell to Earth takes readers from the green valleys of the Pacific Northwest to the dunes of the Arabian Gulf and on to the sprawling chaos of Cairo. Struggling to adapt to her nomadic lifestyle, Sophia is haunted by the feeling that she is perpetually in exile: hovering somewhere between two families, two cultures, and two worlds. She must make a place for herself—a complex journey that includes finding young love in the Arabian Gulf, rebellion in Cairo, and, finally, self-discovery in the mountains of Sinai. The Girl Who Fell to Earth heralds the arrival of an electric new talent and takes us on the most personal of quests: the voyage home.
When I Fell From the Sky
On Christmas Eve 1971, the packed LANSA flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa was struck by lightning and went down in dense jungle hundreds of miles from civilization. Of its 93 passengers, only one survived. Juliane Koepcke, the seventeen-year-old child of famous German zoologists. She'd been thrown from the plane two miles above the forest canopy, but had sustained only a broken collarbone and a cut on her leg. With incredible courage, instinct and ingenuity, she survived three weeks in the "green hell" of the Amazon - using the skills she'd learned in assisting her parents on their research trips into the jungle - before coming across a loggers hut, and, with it, safety. Now she tells her fascinating story for the first time, and in doing so tells us about her 'Gerald Durrell' childhood - with a menagerie of wild, exotic and sometimes dangerous pets - about how she learned to survive at her parents ecological station deep in the rainforest and about her present-day commitment to this wildlife as a biologist and dedicated environmentalist.
