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86 books match the query 'Lives' and 2 start with h

cover of Heaven Is Near: The Lives of Two Artists and Their Daughter’s Quest to Understand

Heaven Is Near

The Lives of Two Artists and Their Daughter’s Quest to Understand

Lo Dagerman

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

Lo Dagerman reconstructs the love, trauma, and creative journeys of her parents—Swedish writer Stig Dagerman and actress Anita Björk

In 1953, Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, one of Europe’s greatest postwar writers, married Anita Björk, an acclaimed actress famous for the Cannes Grand Prix award-winning film Miss Julie. Inscribed into her wedding ring were his words “Heaven Is Near.” A year later, Stig was found dead by suicide. His death shocked Sweden and left a devastated Anita to raise their small daughter, Lo.

Heaven Is Near is Lo Dagerman’s endeavor to understand what happened. In an unconventional hybrid of biography and memoir, Lo dives deep into diaries, notebooks, letters, and other source material to bring her parents’ stories to life. Her account offers an unsparing look at her father’s creative crisis, depression, and suicide, as well as her mother’s life-long striving and sustained success in reaching the height of artistic excellence while navigating motherhood and family. Moving between Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, and Hollywood, Lo lays bare her parents’ legacy not as a tragic abstraction but as their lived experience, inserting her own memories and reflections along the way.

Through Lo’s unsentimental, psychologically rich narration, Heaven Is Near offers a quietly luminous, multigenerational account of genius, trauma, and creative regeneration.

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cover of Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

Hoop Crazy

The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

Dennis Gildea

University of Arkansas Press, 2013

Clair Bee (1896-1983) was a hugely successful basketball coach at Rider College and Long Island University with a 412 and 87 record before his career was derailed in 1951 by a point-shaving scandal. In the trial that sent his star player, Sherman White, to prison, the judge excoriated Bee for creating a morally lax culture that contributed to his players' involvement with gambling. To a certain extent, Bee agreed with the judge's scolding, concluding that coaches, himself included, had become so driven to succeed on the court that they had lost sight of the educational role sports should play. His coaching career effectively over, Bee launched an effort to reform the ills he saw in college sports, and he did so in the pages of the Chip Hilton novels for young readers. He began the series in 1948, but it was the post-scandal books that he used as teaching tools. The books mirrored some of the events of the gambling scandal and were Bee's attempt to reform the problems plaguing college sports. He used his fiction to posit a better sports world that he hoped his young readers would construct and inhabit. The Chip Hilton books were extremely popular and have become a classic series, with over two million copies sold to date. Hoop Crazy is the fascinating story of Clair Bee and his star character Chip Hilton and the ways in which their lives, real and fictional, were intertwined.
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