The author recalls his experiences among the Inuit of Alaska as he attempted to record and translate their "flood" narratives into English, working with an Anglo-Japanese woman who had come to Alaska independently to accomplish the same task.

Through this book, the author tries to answer the question of 'what lies ahead' in a light hearted manner. The protagonist is faced with the harsh reality of losing his precious young life. In the process, his 'twenty one gram' soul travels to another worldly dimension. As the world shuts its door on the hapless soul, he carves the path to his new found afterlife. A plethora of surprises unfold in a serene Heaven and in the dungeons of Hell. So enjoy the journey of a soul into randomness through the eyes of the author.

Howard Norman spent the fall of 1977 in Churchill, Manitoba, translating into English two dozen "Noah stories" told to him by an Inuit elder. The folktales reveal what happened when the biblical Noah sailed his Ark into Hudson Bay in search of woolly mammoths and lost his way. By turns startling, tragic, and comical, these inimitable narratives tell the history of the Arctic and capture the collision of cultures precipitated by the arrival of a hapless stranger in a strange land. Norman himself was then a stranger in a strange land, but he was not alone. In Churchill he encountered Helen Tanizaki, an Anglo-Japanese woman embarked on a similar project--to translate the tales into Japanese. An extraordinary linguist and an exact and compelling friend, Tanizaki became Norman's guide through the characters, stories, and customs he was coming to know, and a remarkable intimacy sprang up between them--all the more intense because it was to be fleeting; Tanizaki was fatally ill. Through a series of overlapping panels of reality and memory, Howard Norman's In Fond Remembrance of Me recaptures with vivid immediacy a brief but life-shifting encounter and the earthy, robust stories that occasioned it.

AARP Digital Editions offer you practical tips, proven solutions, and expert guidance. Surrogate Court dockets are filled with cases involving family members fighting over the assets and intentions of a deceased parent or spouse. Probate Wars of the Rich & Famous: An Insider’s Guide to Estate Planning and Probate Litigation tracks the estate litigation cases of Anna Nicole Smith, Brooke Astor, Michael Jackson, Nina Wang, Jerry Garcia and Leona Helmsley and identifies the five universal factors that caused such disputes. Each chapter provides estate planning insights designed to help individuals plan their estates without causing litigation. If, however, probate litigation cannot be avoided, the book also provides invaluable lessons about undue influence claims, how to remove a fiduciary, demanding an estate accounting and claims seeking to set aside lifetime transfers that undermined the decedents intentions. Few - if any – estate planning books utilize colorful celebrity accounts to provide meaningful insights and actionable advice.

“Some books celebrate the human condition; others commiserate with us. This memoir does both.” —Helen Oyeyemi, NPR This spellbinding memoir by the National Book Award–nominated author of The Bird Artist begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a midwestern boy’s summer working in a bookmobile, under the shadow of his grifter father and the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. Howard Norman’s life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales—including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is “I hate to leave this beautiful place”—and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. Years later, Norman and his wife lend their Washington, DC, home to a poet and her young son, and a subsequent murder-suicide in the house has a profound effect on them. In this “unexpectedly arresting” memoir, life’s unpredictable strangeness is fashioned into a creative and redemptive story (The New York Times Book Review). “Norman uses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling periods of his life, each separated by time and subtle shifts in his narrative voice. . . . The originality of his telling here is as surprising as ever.” —The Washington Post “These stories almost seem like tall tales themselves, but Norman renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these bizarre experiences, he finds solace through the places he’s lived and their quirky inhabitants, human and avian.” —The New Yorker

The assassin and her revenge: a tale of moral heroism and female self-fashioning in an age of mass communication -- Media sensation: public justice and the sympathy of an urban audience -- Highbrow ambivalence: fear of the masses and feminized sentiment -- The trial: courtroom spectacle and ethical sentiment in the rule of law -- A state pardon: sanctioned violence under Nationalist rule -- Beyond the 1930s: from wartime patriotism to counter-revolutionary sentiment.