Books with author John Knowles

An unflinching story of a troubled friendship — and one girl’s struggle to come to terms with secrets and shame and find her own power to heal.Leah Greene is dead. For Laine, knowing what really happened and the awful feeling that she is, in some way, responsible set her on a journey of painful self-discovery. Yes, she wished for this. She hated Leah that much. Hated her for all the times in the closet, when Leah made her do those things. They were just practicing, Leah said. But why did Leah choose her? Was she special, or just easy to control? And why didn’t Laine make it stop sooner? In the aftermath of the tragedy, Laine is left to explore the devastating lessons Leah taught her, find some meaning in them, and decide whether she can forgive Leah and, ultimately, herself.

[Read by Scott Snively] Devon School, an exclusive prep school for boys in New Hampshire, is a world unto itself. But it's the summer of 1942 and the massive thundercloud of World War II threatens the school's peaceful environment. Paralleling the war, where enemies real and imagined are sometimes collaborated with and sometimes destroyed, is the friendship between Gene and Phineas, two students attending the 1942 summer session at Devon. Their idyllic world begins to fall apart as the war escalates, and suspicion and the complexities of adolescence result in violence and betrayal. A Separate Peace has become a modern classic.

In a return to middle-grade fiction, master of perspectives Jo Knowles depicts a younger sibling struggling to maintain his everyday life when his older sister is in crisis.Noah is just trying to make it through seventh grade. The girls are confusing, the homework is boring, and even his friends are starting to bug him. Not to mention that his older sister, Emma, has been acting pretty strange, even though Noah thought she’d been doing better ever since the Thing They Don’t Talk About. The only place he really feels at peace is in art class, with a block of clay in his hands. As it becomes clear through Emma’s ever-stricter food rules and regulations that she’s not really doing better at all, the normal seventh-grade year Noah was hoping for begins to seem pretty unattainable. In an affecting and realistic novel with bright spots of humor, Jo Knowles captures the complexities of navigating middle school while feeling helpless in the face of a family crisis.

“Joe” Knowles' story needs no introduction to New England readers. Knowles (1869-1942), the famous Boston artist, entered the wilderness of Maine on August 4, 1913, naked, without firearms, matches, or even a knife, and lived for two months as a primitive man, relying wholly on his own resources. In this book he tells what he did and how he did It.He describes why he undertook the experiment, and tells in detail how he lived: how he made his fires, what he ate and how he got it, how he caught fish and killed animals with his hands alone, how he sheltered and clothed himself; he narrates his wanderings and adventures, describes his physical and mental sensations, shows the scientific value of the primitive lite, and outlines his plans for the future along primitive lines.At last the dream of a thoroughgoing return to nature has been realized. A self-tutored artist (formerly a wilderness guide), Mr. Knowles went into the woods of northern Maine in August, 1913, naked, without so much as a match or a knife, and, after living for the stipulated two months in total independence of the advantages of civilization, emerged tanned and bearded, clad in bearskin and deerskin, carrying bow and arrows and a deer-horn knife. His life in the woods the author habitually views in two aspects, the physical and the mental. He entered the woods on a rainy day, and, being unable to make a fire, he spent two nights resting and running alternately at short intervals in order to keep warm. Afterwards he enjoyed the warmth of a fire and the shelter of a lean-to, save for one miserable night which resulted in a fever. His food consisted of berries, bark, fish, partridges, squirrels, and some venison and bear meat. The hear he trapped, and killed by clubbing him on the nose; the deer he killed by breaking his neck by main force. Mr. Knowles apparently did not suffer through the absence of salt from his diet, nor from the extreme irregularity of his eating. as regards both quantity and time. Nor was be rendered uncomfortable through giving up suddenly the habit of smoking cigarettes. His physical life, in brief, though not without tribulations, seemed to him of almost trifling importance in comparison with his mental life.“My suffering," he writes, “was purely mental and a hundredfold worse than any physical suffering I experienced." It had never occurred to him that he might be lonely, but the thought of his isolation and of his friends and his past life tortured him so relentlessly, especially at twilight, that he vowed again and again that he would return next day to the camp whence he had entered upon his wanderings. Seeking diversion from his thoughts of civilized life, he drew, on birch bark, with burnt sticks from his fires, a number of sketches, first-rate examples of which illustrate his book; and he found further diversion in cultivating the friendship of a chipmunk, a flock of partridges, and a deer and fawn, to all of whom he spoke as to human beings.His story was an “exclusive ’’ for one newspaper, but all New Englanders followed his adventure with amused interest which has not yet lagged, because another paper has made a promising attempt to discredit his story. But it seems to have failed, and Mr. Knowles continued appearing before the public describing the delights of primitive life. Whatever the extent of his influence, he certainly attracted in New England a. considerable public attention of a cap-flinging kind, which is well illustrated by a photograph showing “a portion of the crowd that greeted Joseph Knowles on his arrival in Boston." Originally published in 1913; reformatted for Kindle; may contain occasional imperfection; original spellings have been kept in place.