Beat the rise! Delivery fees are going up soon. INFO

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

A Beautiful, Chaotic, Leaky Symphony

James Allyn

$41.95   $35.49

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
James Allyn
26 March 2026
A Beautiful, Chaotic, Leaky Symphony

Part professional odyssey, part personal reckoning, A Beautiful, Chaotic, Leaky Symphony is the debut memoir from James Allyn. After seven decades of navigating the worlds of the music industry, inventions, and the wine business, Allyn pulls back the curtain on a life defined by transition. From the adrenaline of yacht racing and the America's Cup to the high-stakes world of a California real estate broker, this story explores what it truly means to build a life from the ground up.

Tracing a journey from Des Moines, Iowa to California, Allyn offers a strikingly candid look at rebuilding life after a long-term marriage. Through the sensory precision of a certified sommelier and the raw energy of a rock band, he examines the ""middle spaces"" of existence-the parts that aren't quite perfect, but are entirely human.

This is a memoir of reinvention after 70 for anyone who has ever felt like their life was a work in progress-and realized that finding purpose in later life is exactly how the symphony is supposed to be written.
By:  
Imprint:   James Allyn
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 16mm
Weight:   381g
ISBN:   9798218947897
Pages:   282
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

James Allyn is a professional survivor of the ""strategicreset,"" a man who has spent seven decades treating existenceas a high-stakes scavenger hunt rather than a career path. Fromthe vibration-heavy gondola of the Goodyear Blimp to theresin-clouded shipyards of Modena, Italy, James hasconsistently proven that the most important thing anyone canever design is their own exit strategy.A connoisseur of the ""glorious, stupid thing,"" James haschased the sublime and the absurd in equal measure. He hasstood at the crossroads of history-lighting the ""beigemonolith"" of the first Macintosh for Steve Jobs and witnessingthe birth of cinematic legends-only to realize that the mostenduring stories are found in the scuffs and dents of thejourney. Whether wrestling a ""shopping cart of anvils"" down a frozen mountain or orchestrating a transatlantic miracle of fiberglass and fire pits, he has lived with a defiant commitment to never arriving at the finish line uncreased.After surviving the seismic ""tantrum"" of the 1989 earthquake, the ""biblical baptism"" of the yacht racing world, and the ""paprika-colored"" chaos of the restaurant business, James has found his truthful ending. He lives on a farm in thefoothills of North San Diego County, surrounded by therhythmic crunch of grazing horses and the ghosts of the manylives he was foolish enough to live. A Beautiful, Chaotic, LeakySymphony is his first book-a testament to a man who arrived with pockets full of sea glass, a heart full of gratitude, and are fusal to ever apologize for the noise.

See Also