For readers of Alan Cumming's Not My Father's Son comes a heart-wrenching memoir that interrogates an abusive father and his dark legacy.
Children who experience physical, mental, and emotional trauma at the hands of a parent often grow into adults who suffer from mental illness and find it difficult to build lasting, healthy relationships. Some find it impossible to integrate into society and are constantly searching for the love and approval that they never received as a child. The abuse impacts all aspects of the survivor's life.
In his new memoir, Brent LaPorte asks his dead father questions that will never be answered. Unatoned not only explores the dark nature of LaPorte's father, but the darkness that has, at times, enveloped him, too. In confronting life choices that have hurt those around him, he asks: is it possible to break the cycle of a violent, alcoholic family history and live a life that is productive, loving and, above all, happy?
In exploring the challenges of his youth, married life, and careers, LaPorte lays bare failings and triumphs, sharing pain and struggle to ultimately tell readers: none of us are alone. This is not a "self-help" book, rather the story of a man's request for atonement for sins past. His father's - and his own.
?Say Uncle! is the definitive book on the history, players, and techniques of catch-as-catch-can grappling.
Catch-as-catch-can, or "catch wrestling" for short, is the great-granddaddy of today's mixed martial arts, professional wrestling, freestyle wrestling, and many reality-based self-defence systems. It is a nearly lost form of Western martial art that is rich in history and full of painfully brutal techniques. Say Uncle! traces the background of this unique sport through America and Japan back to England and Ireland and is chock full of exclusive interviews from legends like Karl Gotch, Billy Robinson, Josh Barnett, and more. The technique section is fully illustrated so readers can begin to use these powerfully effective techniques and strategies in their grappling and mixed martial arts game.
In the same vein as Total MMA (ECW), Say Uncle! obliterates the myths of the roots of modern mixed martial arts and shows that today's WWE and UFC have a lot more in common than just Brock Lesnar. The catch-as-catch-can roots of modern MMA and pro-wrestling are well documented but little known, until now.
?The Bayou is a world of its own - a marshy, sometimes treacherous, oft-times sinister land of creeping darkness and living shadows, secret legends and vivid mythology. It is that darkness and those shadows that permeate Bayou Underground, the first study of the Louisiana music scene ever to leave behind the bright lights of big city New Orleans, and plunge instead into the wilderness that not only surrounds the Big Easy, but which stretches for hundreds of miles on either side, from Houston, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama.
Bayou Underground explores the music of the region from the House of the Rising Sun to gator hunting with Amos Moses (the one-armed Cajun backwoodsman created by country songwriter Jerry Reed) to artists like Bo Diddley, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, who were influenced by unsung heroes of the Bayou.
In Bayou Underground, the people and the cultures that have called the bayou home are unearthed through their words and lives, but most of all through the music that has, over the last century, either arisen from the swamplands themselves, or been drawn from fellow visitors to the region, as they seek to set down for posterity the emotions, dreams, and enchantments that the area instilled in them.
Part social history, part epic travelogue, and partly a lament for a way of life that has now all but disappeared, Bayou Underground is the gripping story of American music's forgotten childhood, and the parentage it barely even knows about. By comparison, the Big Easy had it easy.
?You sit down at the weathered harvest table to write a letter to your son. You need to explain the horrific events of the night, the circumstances that stained your hands with so much blood - the horrors that led you to take the lives of your own father and grandfather.
You journey back through darkness, deliberately, tentatively, to recover your own childhood. You compose your captivity, your torture, and the brutality of the men you've just killed. This was life on the farm: the strange and unspeakable things that went on.
And still, hope burned.
By the very same light you also write about escape, about security, compassion, and even love. The simple kindnesses that made you the man you are today, shielding you from danger, teaching you to live?.
Until everything changed - everything but the farm.
At once as bleak and moving, tense and beautiful as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Brent LaPorte's Hope Burned emerges from the ashes of the simplest, nearest apocalypse, from the innocence of childhood utterly betrayed, to ask which is the more difficult: to choose to live, or to die?
