{ "item_title" : "Bread of Angels", "item_author" : [" Patti Smith "], "item_description" : "Click Here for the Autographed CopyA radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just KidsGod whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbors, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairy tales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies. The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Smith starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic recordings and songs such as Horses and Easter, “Dancing Barefoot” and “Because the Night.” She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred “Sonic” Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family. As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life, and, finally, writing again—the one constant on a path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live. Patti Smith is the author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids, as well as Woolgathering, M Train, Year of the Monkey, and Collected Lyrics. Her seminal album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. Her global exhibitions include Strange Messenger, Land 250, Camera Solo, and Evidence. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, Smith is also the recipient of the ASCAP Founders Award, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize, the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, and the Legion d’honneur.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/10/187/512/1101875127_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "30.00", "our_price" : "30.00", "club_price" : "30.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "30.00" } }

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As a toddler, Patti Smith says she “believed I could write the longest book in the world, record the events of every single day. I would write it all down in such a way that everyone would find something of themselves.” In Bread of Angels, this legendary writer, poet, musician, performer and photographer continues to chronicle her journey. In her National Book Award-winning Just Kids, Smith wrote about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their coming-of-age as artists; later, she sketched out her days in M Train. Now, Smith is decidedly having a moment, hitting the road for the 50th anniversary tour of her debut album, Horses. Bread of Angels traces the arc of her eventful life, from childhood to present, a project she fittingly began and finished in the Hotel Suisse, in Nice, France, where James Joyce began writing Finnegans Wake, the “incomprehensible tome that opened the twentieth century,” Smith muses. “It was also my century.” The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame calls Smith “the high priestess of punk-poetry,” and the contrast between Smith’s childhood and the edgy performer she became is stark. A teacher called her “an odd duck, as if let loose from a Hans Christian Andersen tale.” Indeed, there is a fairy tale quality to her early years: She was an imaginative, sickly girl from a poor family that relocated numerous times, living in a Philadelphia tenement and later a housing development in southern New Jersey where she roamed the “swampy woodland.” And yet, the genius of Smith is that she unites these disparate worlds, showing how the pursuit of art has defined her life. Much of her trajectory, she maintains, has been due to her independent spirit—“my rebel hump.” Chapters overflow with insight and yearning, especially for her late husband, guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, and Mapplethorpe—“the love of my life and the artist of my life.” She describes her shocking decision to leave her band to follow Fred to Detroit, “my second declaration of existence.” There are idyllic scenes of the couple filling the halls of the empty hotel where they lived with improvised music, and later raising their family in a cozy, castle-like house on a Michigan canal. Sorrow and loss loom large—the death of Fred, her parents, her brother and friends. There’s even a startling, later-in-life DNA revelation. Bread of Angels is an exquisitely crafted paean, Smith’s grand act of bearing witness to all the decades of her awe-filled life. “At times I mourn the worlds I knew,” she writes, “the hopes of my generation, flowers in hair, dancing to The Dead, seeking a universal music, ‘the language of peace,’ as Jimi Hendrix would say.” Ultimately, she concludes, “Shedding is one of life’s most difficult tasks. One by one we apportion our talismans. But I will keep my wedding ring and my children’s love.” Thankfully, Smith continues to share her talismans with the world.