Michael Mewshaw
Список книг автора Michael MewshawBetween Terror and Tourism
For his 65th birthday, acclaimed novelist Michael Mewshaw took a 4,000-mile overland trip across North Africa. Arriving in Egypt during food riots, he heads west into Libya, where billions in oil money have produced little except citizens eager to flee to Europe or join the jihad in Iraq. In Tunis, Mewshaw visits an abandoned Star Wars movie set where Al Qaeda has just kidnapped two tourists. Ignoring U.S. Embassy warnings he crosses into Algeria, traveling through mountain towns and seething metropolises where 200,000 people have died during more than a decade of sectarian violence. Searching for the tombs of seven monks murdered by Islamic fundamentalists, he reaches a village where six more people have been beheaded the day before. When he interviews a repentant terrorist responsible for 5,000 deaths, the man praises the Boy Scouts for training him.By contrast, the Moroccan city of Tangier seems almost tame. But then he meets the last literary protégé of Paul Bowles who accuses Bowles of plagiarism and murder. In the end, the reader, like the author, is immersed in a fascinating adventure that’s sometimes tragic, often funny, occasionally terrifying and always a revelation of a strange place and its people.
The Lost Prince
“In The Lost Prince Michael Mewshaw sets down one of the most gripping stories of friendship I’ve ever read.” —Daniel Menaker, author of My Mistake: A Memoir Pat Conroy was America’s poet laureate of family dysfunction. A larger-than-life character and the author of such classics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini , Conroy was remembered by everybody for his energy, his exuberance, and his selflacerating humor. Michael Mewshaw’s The Lost Prince is an intimate memoir of his friendship with Pat Conroy, one that involves their families and those days in Rome when they were both young—when Conroy went from being a popular regional writer to an international bestseller. Family snapshots beautifully illustrate that time. Shortly before his forty-ninth birthday, Conroy telephoned Mewshaw to ask a terrible favor. With great reluctance, Mewshaw did as he was asked—and never saw Pat Conroy again. Although they never managed to reconcile their differences completely, Conroy later urged Mewshaw to write about “me and you and what happened . . . i know it would cause much pain to both of us. but here is what that story has that none of your others have.” The Lost Prince is Mewshaw’s fulfillment of a promise.
Ad In Ad Out: Collected Tennis Articles of Michael Mewshaw 1982-2015
For the past thirty-five years Michael Mewshaw has covered pro tennis with a novelist’s sense of style, a travel writer’s feeling for place and an investigative reporter’s commitment to unearthing the truth. Like Short Circuit, his description of life on the men’s tour – the New York Times hailed it as “one of the best books ever written about tennis, and the most timely” – and Ladies of the Court, his account of the women’s circuit, Mewshaw’s articles offer original and often shocking insights into a sport that all too often receives superficial coverage. AD IN AD OUT ranges over four decades, providing vivid profiles of Bjorn Borg, Gabriella Sabatini, Monica Seles, Ivan Lendl, Andrea Jaeger, Andre Agassi, Rafa Nadal and Serena Williams. It depicts the sport’s beauty, its captivating geometry, and its exhilarating mano a mano competition. Whether analyzing a Grand Slam final or self-deprecatingly admitting his own comic attempts to master the game, Mewshaw conveys his knowledge of tennis history, along with his passion for the sport and the men and women who excel at it. His evocation of high stakes tournaments in Italy, France and England is more than equaled by his accounts of matches on garage rooftops, on private and public London courts, and beside a Spanish swimming pool where his opponent wears espadrilles and a bikini. But AD IN AD OUT also discusses subjects that rarely get reported. Betting and match-fixing, performance enhancing drugs, tanking and sexual abuse all come in for factual examination. And so does the increasing frequency with which tournaments are played in sunny places for shady people, i.e. in tax havens, repressive states eager to improve their images, and lawless regions where organized crime has discovered tennis as an excellent way to launder money. After AD IN AD OUT no reader will ever watch tennis without realizing how much more there is to the game.
If You Could See Me Now
When Michael Mewshaw receives a call from a stranger who says she has reason to believe he is her biological father, Mewshaw realizes he has been half dreading, half hoping for this to happen for over thirty years. Just like the young woman who wants to find the last piece to the puzzle of her life, he thinks it’s possible that in the same process he will discover the answer to questions that have plagued him for decades. But first he has to make sure that she is who she claims to be.In this fascinating memoir, Mewhsaw confronts his own past, the chaos of his family, and complicated memories of the woman he once loved who went on to success as an ambassador, Under Secretary of State and a member of one of America’s most influential families. His unusual role in the baby’s birth, her adoption and, now, her search for her biological parents sets the stage for a revealing personal odyssey that offers a quest for identity and a journey of discovery, an obsession with recapturing the past and righting old wrongs, the constant potential for disappointment balanced against the possibility of redemption. As he finds his old flame and her old lover, rediscovering who he was and who he has become, he finds his life enriched in the process.