Tom Bissell Livres

" Une passionnante enquête sur la vie des Apôtres, qui mêle l'irrévérence du récit de voyage au sérieux de l'exégèse. " The New Yorker Omniprésents dans la culture judéo-chrétienne, les Apôtres apparaissent dans quantité de textes et d'oeuvres d'art. Mais que sait-on réellement de ces douze hommes qui ont partagé l'intimité du Christ ? Pour percer ce mystère, Tom Bissell, journaliste et écrivain américain, a entrepris un pèlerinage hors du commun sur leurs pas. De Jérusalem à Rome, de la Grèce à la Turquie en passant par la France, l'Inde et le Kirghizstan, il s'est rendu sur leurs tombes, croisant au passage des personnages haut en couleur. Son enquête singulière, qui a duré huit ans, apporte aujourd'hui un éclairage passionnant sur l'identité des Douze. Tout à la fois aventure intellectuelle, littéraire, spirituelle et personnelle, ce livre est un régal d'érudition et d'humanité, qui confronte mythes et réalités pour comprendre l'essence et l'avènement du christianisme.

In 2003, an independent film called The Room - starring and written, produced, directed by a mysteriously wealthy social misfit of indeterminate age and origin named Tommy Wiseau - made its disastrous debut in Los Angeles. Described by one reviewer as "like getting stabbed in the head," the six-million-dollar film earned a grand total of $1800 at the box office and closed after two weeks. Ten years later, The Room is an international cult phenomenon. Thousands of fans wait in line for hours to attend screenings complete with costumes, audience rituals, merchandising, and thousands of plastic spoons. This book recounts the film's long, strange journey to infamy, unraveling mysteries for fans, also giving a portrait of a mysterious man who got past every road block in the Hollywood system to achieve success on his own terms

"In 1960, the Aral Sea was the size of Lake Michigan: a huge body of water in the deserts of central Asia. By 1996, when Tom Bissell arrived in Uzbekistan as a naive Peace Corps volunteer, disastrous Soviet irrigation policies had shrunk the sea to a third its size. Bissell lasted only a few months before complications forced him to return home." "Five years later, Bissell convinces a magazine to send him to Central Asia to investigate the Aral Sea's destruction. There he joins forces with a high-spirited young Uzbek named Rustam, and together they make their often wild way through the ancient cities - Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara - of this fascinating but often misunderstood part of the world. Slipping more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police, who suspect them of crimes ranging from Christian evangelism to heroin smuggling, the two young men develop an unlikely friendship as they journey to the shores of the devastated sea." "Along the way, Bissell provides a history of the Uzbeks, recounting their region's long, violent subjugation by despots such as Jenghiz Khan and Joseph Stalin. He conjures the people of Uzbekistan with depth and empathy, and he captures their contemporary struggles to cope with Islamist terrorism, the legacy of totalitarianism, and the profound environmental and human damage wrought by the sea's disappearance."--Jacket.

A personal assessment of the author's addiction to video games explores his favorites, their roles as modern forms of popular art, and their habit-forming appeal while considering how he has neglected his professional and social responsibilities in favorof gaming activities.

In April 1975, as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, former Marine officer John Bissell was glued to his television, racked with anguish and horror as his country abandoned a cause for which so many of his friends had died. This book is his son Tom's reckoning with the Vietnam War and its impact on his father, his country, and Vietnam itself. Bissell also explores the many debates about the war, and shows how the war has continued to influence American views on foreign policy more than thirty years later. At the heart of the book is John and Tom Bissell's journey back to Vietnam. As they travel the country and talk to Vietnamese veterans, we relive the war as John Bissell experienced it, visit the site of his near-fatal wounding, and hear him explain how Vietnam shaped him and so many of his generation.--From publisher description.

Somewhere in the not-so-distant future the residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy are ensnared in the search for the master copy of INFINITE JEST, a movie said to be so dangerously entertaining its viewers become entranced and expire in a state of catatonic bliss . . . 'Wallace's exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight, and he has deep things to say about the hollowness of contemporary American pleasure . . . sentences and whole pages are marvels of cosmic concentration . . . Wallace is a superb comedian of culture' James Wood, GUARDIAN