Now, for the first time on CD and in a convenient box set, he gives voice to his biting sensibility.Barrel Fever and others Stories is Sedaris' first collection of comic stories and essays. Performed by David and Amy Sedaris, this program is described by the New York Post as "a nuclear barrage of humor you could never replicate by reading this material on your own."In Holidays on Ice, Sedaris skewers the absurd conventions and contrivances of the holiday season, with hilarious effect.Naked, a riotous compilation of stories performed by David and Amy Sedaris, was praised by Publishers Weekly as "highly likeable and spirited throughout."Traveling from his childhood in North Carolina to a second linguistic childhood as a non-French-speaking citizen of Paris, Me Talk Pretty One Day is both poignant and full of humor.

    An exhilarating account of Sapolsky’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti — for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects — unique and compelling characters in their own right — and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him.By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.

    Remen's grandfather, an orthodox rabbi and scholar of the Kabbalah, saw life as a web of connection and knew that everyone belonged to him, and that he belonged to everyone. He taught her that blessing one another is what fills our emptiness, heals our loneliness, and connects us more deeply to life.Life has given us many more blessings than we have allowed ourselves to receive. My Grandfather's Blessings is about how we can recognize and receive our blessings and bless the life in others. Serving others heals us. Through our service we will discover our own wholeness—and the way to restore hidden wholeness in the world.

    The heat was unbearable, malaria would be a constant danger, her husband would have to be away for long stretches, there were no schools or nearby doctors for their three daughters, and of course the area teemed with wild animals. Yet for Kobie and her family, the seventeen years at South Africa's Kruger National Park were the most magical of their lives. Now, in The Wilderness Family, Kobie recounts the enchanting adventures and extraordinary encounters they experienced in this vast reserve where wildlife has right of way.Kobie and her husband Kobus were overwhelmed by the beauty of the Mahlangeni ranger station when they arrived with their little girls in the autumn of 1980. Golden sunshine glowed in the lush garden where fruit bats hung in the sausage trees; hippos basked in the glittering waters of the Letaba River; storks and herons perched along the shore. Kobie felt she had found heaven on earth--until she awoke that first night to find a python slithering silently across her bedroom floor. It was the perfect introduction to the wonders and terrors that awaited her.As the Krügers settled in, they became accustomed to living in the midst of ravishing splendor and daily surprises. A honey badger they nursed back to health rampaged affectionately through the house. Sneaky hyenas stole blankets and cook pots. Ordinarily placid elephants grew foul-tempered and violent in the summer heat. And one terrible day, the shadow of tragedy fell across the family when a lion attacked Kobus in the bush and nearly killed him.But nothing prepared the Krügers for the adventure of raising an orphaned lion cub. The cub was only a few days old and on the verge of death when they found him alone.  Leo, as the girls promptly named the cub, survived on loads of love and bottles of fat-enriched milk, and soon became an affectionate, rambunctious member of the family. At the heart of the book, Kobie recounts the unique bond that each of the Krügers forged with Leo and their sometimes hilarious endeavor to teach him to become a "real" lion and live with his own kind in the wild.Writing with deep affection and luminous prose, Kobie Krüger captures here the mystery of untamed Africa--its fathomless skies, soulful landscapes, and most of all, its astonishing array of animals. By turns funny and heart-breaking, engaging and suspenseful, The Wilderness Family is an unforgettable memoir of a woman, her family, and the amazing game reserve they called home for seventeen incredible years.

    Surrounded by the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, Fuling has long been a place of continuity, far from the bustling political centers of Beijing and Shanghai. But now Fuling is heading down a new path, and gradually, along with scores of other towns in this vast and ever-evolving country, it is becoming a place of change and vitality, tension and reform, disruption and growth. As the people of Fuling hold on to the China they know, they are also opening up and struggling to adapt to a world in which their fate is uncertain.Fuling's position at the crossroads came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. He found himself teaching English and American literature at the local college, discovering how Shakespeare and other classics look when seen through the eyes of students who have been raised in the Sichuan countryside and educated in Communist Party doctrine. His students, though, are the ones who taught him about the ways of Fuling — and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society.As he learns the language and comes to know the people, Hessler begins to see that it is indeed a unique moment for Fuling. In its past is Communist China's troubled history — the struggles of land reform, the decades of misguided economic policies, and the unthinkable damage of the Cultural Revolution — and in the future is the Three Gorges Dam, which upon completion will partly flood thecity and force the resettlement of more than a million people. Making his way in the city and traveling by boat and train throughout Sichuan province and beyond, Hessler offers vivid descriptions of the people he meets, from priests to prostitutes and peasants to professors, and gives voice to their views. This is both an intimate personal story of his life in Fuling and a colorful, beautifully written account of the surrounding landscape and its history. Imaginative, poignant, funny, and utterly compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that, much like China itself, is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

    He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have beem overlooked.In the decade of the Great Depression, Charlie moved his family twenty-one times, keeping seven children one step ahead of the poverty and starvation that threatened them from every side. He worked at the steel mill when the steel was rolling, or for a side of bacon or a bushel of peaches when it wasn’t. He paid the doctor who delivered his fourth daughter, Margaret -- Bragg’s mother -- with a jar of whiskey. He understood the finer points of the law as it applied to poor people and drinking men; he was a banjo player and a buck dancer who worked off fines when life got a little sideways, and he sang when he was drunk, where other men fought or cussed. He had a talent for living.His children revered him. When he died, cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile.Rick Bragg has built a soaring monument to the grandfather he never knew -- a father who stood by his family in hard times and left a backwoods legend behind -- in a book that blazes with his love for his family, and for a particular stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border. A powerfully intimate piece of American history as it was experienced by the working people of the Deep South, a glorious record of a life of character, tenacity and indomitable joy and an unforgettable tribute to a vanishing culture, Ava’s Man is Rick Bragg at his stunning best.

    But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O'Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, "short-necked, golden balls of wool," O'Brien embarked on a journey that returned buffalo to his land for the first time in more than a century and a half.Buffalo for the Broken Heart is at once a tender account of the buffaloes' first seasons on the ranch and an engaging lesson in wildlife ecology. Whether he's describing the grazing pattern of the buffalo, the thrill of watching a falcon home in on its prey, or the comical spectacle of a buffalo bull wallowing in the mud, O'Brien combines a novelist's eye for detail with a naturalist's understanding to create an enriching, entertaining narrative.

    It's a book to relish, to read and re-read. Unforgettable." --Salmon RushdieAn electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer ("A wonderfully free and original talent"--Harold Pinter) and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution.Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels.Her memoir is both a revelatory insider's account of the Revolution and a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Belli writes with both striking lyricism and candor about her personal and political lives: about her family, her children, the men in her life; about her poetry; about the dichotomies between her birth-right and the life she chose for herself; about the failures and triumphs of the Revolution; about her current life, divided between California (with her American husband and their children) and Nicaragua; and about her sustained and sustaining passion for her country and its people.

    When asked by a young priest to repeat the sacred ceremonial phrase "to honor and obey," Lupe surprises herself and says. "No, I will not say 'obey'. How dare you! You don't talk to me like this after fifty years of marriage and I now knowing what I know!" After the hilarious shock of Lupe's rejection of the ceremony, the Villaseñor family is forced to examine the love that Lupe and Salvador have shared for so many years -- a universal, gut-honest love that will eventually energize and inspire the couple into old age.

    They do their best work under pressure. Janice Hudson was an adrenaline-charged emergency room nurse in a San Francisco-area hospital when a friend told her about CALSTAR, a fledgling helicopter ambulance service with an opening for a flight nurse. Weeks later she was swooping over the Bay Area to scenes of shootings, accidents and disasters. The trauma junkie had found her element.Hudson spent ten years as a flight nurse, answering calls that were by turns horrifying, heroic and absurd. She decries her personal flights from hell that involved children and drunk drivers. In this moving story, she recalls her triumphs, like the time she performed a surgical cricothyrotomy on a patient as he hung upside down in his overturned car -- in the dark. And she shakes her head at some of the bizarre calls, like the one that took her to the scene of a suspicious mountain lion attack (there are no mountain lions in the Bay Area). But no matter what the call, CALSTAR and its dedicated crew braved danger and hardship to reach the scene of catastrophe in a race against time to bring help to those whose only hope of survival lay in the speed of the helicopter and the skill of the medical crew.A born storyteller, Janice Hudson writes with compassion, insight and wry humor. Trauma Junkie is an in-the-trenches account of emergency nursing at its most demanding.

    Long considered one of the best poets in America today, Baca was illiterate at the age of twenty-one and facing five to ten years behind bars for selling drugs. A Place to Stand is the remarkable tale of how he emerged after his years in the penitentiary -- much of it spent in isolation -- with the ability to read and a passion for writing poetry. A vivid portrait of life inside a maximum-security prison and an affirmation of one man's spirit in overcoming the most brutal adversity, A Place to Stand stands as proof there is always hope in even the most desperate lives -- (Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram). A Place to Stand is a hell of a book, quite literally. You won't soon forget it. -- Luis Urrea, The San Diego Union-Tribune This book will have a permanent place in American letters. -- Jim Harrison

    Amid escalating nuclear tensions, Kim Jong-un and North Korea's other leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party state, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-Hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Sent to the notorious labor camp Yodok when he was nine years old, Kang observed frequent public executions and endured forced labor and near-starvation rations for ten years. In 1992, he escaped to South Korea, where he found God and now advocates for human rights in North Korea. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, this book brings together unassailable firsthand experience, setting one young man's personal suffering in the wider context of modern history, giving eyewitness proof to the abuses perpetrated by the North Korean regime.

    A national bestseller on its first publication in 2003, Madam Secretary combines warm humor with profound insights and personal testament with fascinating additions to the historical record.

    It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery.Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history – the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities.In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

    She survived, but her world was destroyed. Her training as a philosopher could not help her make sense of things, and many of her fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits were shattered.At once a personal narrative of recovery and a philosophical exploration of trauma, this book examines the undoing and remaking of a self in the aftermath of violence. It explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, memory and truth, identity and self, autonomy and community. It offers imaginative access to the experience of a rape survivor as well as a reflective critique of a society in which women routinely fear and suffer sexual violence.As Brison observes, trauma disrupts memory, severs past from present, and incapacitates the ability to envision a future. Yet the act of bearing witness, she argues, facilitates recovery by integrating the experience into the survivor's life's story. She also argues for the importance, as well as the hazards, of using first-person narratives in understanding not only trauma, but also larger philosophical questions about what we can know and how we should live.Bravely and beautifully written, Aftermath is that rare book that is an illustration of its own arguments.

    In Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life, you'll find hundreds of this celebrated author's most insightful, illuminating, and transforming statements about writing, creativity, and truth. INCLUDES NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED MATERIAL FROML'ENGLE'S WORKSHOPS AND SPEECHES.

    A Common Assault describes an incident in Italy when he was mugged, and found himself trying to give a statement to the police in bad Italian. The History Boys harks back once more to Bennetts time at school, and shows how the raw material of experience was eventually transformed into the highly-acclaimed stage play The History Boys. Arise, Sir..., finishes on a light-hearted note, in which Bennett muses on the Honours List in typically iconoclastic mode.

    But more than forty years later, the couple has operated on more than 20,000 women, most of whom suffer from obstetric fistula, a debilitating childbirth injury. In this awe-inspiring book, Dr. Catherine Hamlin recalls her life and career in Ethiopia. Her unyielding courage and solid faith will astound Christians worldwide as she talks about the people she has grown to love and the hospital that so many Ethiopian women have come to depend on. She truly is the Mother Teresa of our age.

    With her ocean-going rowing shell and her husband, Doug Fesler, in a small boat of his own, she has disappeared every summer for years, exploring the rugged shorelines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Norway. Carrying what they need to be self-sufficient, the two of them have battled mountainous seas and hurricane-force winds, dragged their boats across jumbles of ice, fended off grizzlies and polar bears, been serenaded by humpback whales and scrutinized by puffins, and reveled in moments of calm.As Fredston writes, these trips are "neither a vacation nor an escape, they are a way of life." Rowing to Latitude is a lyrical, vivid celebration of these northern journeys and the insights they inspired. It is a passionate testimonial to the extraordinary grace and fragility of wild places, the power of companionship, the harsh but liberating reality of risk, the lure of discovery, and the challenges and joys of living an unconventional life.

    "A striking and original story of the journey from troubled childhood to self-aware adult."Soon to be a major motion picture starring and directed by Denzel Washington, Finding Fish is the memoir of Antwone Fisher's miraculous journey from abandonment and abuse to liberation, manhood, and extraordinary success--a modern-day Oliver Twist.Baby Boy Fisher--as he was documented in his child welfare caseworkers' reports--was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. After beginning his life in an orphanage, Antwone was placed in a temporary foster home until, around age two, he was transferred to a second foster home. It was there, over the next thirteen years, that he endured emotional abandonment and physical abuse. Removed from this foster home not long before his sixteenth birthday, Antwone found fleeting refuge in a boys' reform school but was soon thrust into the nightmare of homelessness.Though convinced he was unwanted and unworthy, Fish, as he came to be known, refused to allow his spirit to be broken. Instead, he became determined to raise himself, to listen to social workers and teachers who intervened on his behalf, and to nurture a romantic heart along with a scathing sense of humor and a wondrous imagination--all of which sustained him with big dreams of a better day. Fatefully, just as Antwone's life on the streets hit rock bottom, he enlisted in the United States Navy, where he remained for the next eleven years. During that time, Fish became a man of the world, raised by the Navy family he created for himself.Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born--first as the child who painted the feelings his words dared not speak, then as a poet and storyteller who would eventually become one of Hollywood's most well-paid, sought-after screenwriters. But before he ascends those lofty steps, Antwone's story takes us from the Navy to his jobs as a federal correctional officer and then a security guard at Sony Pictures in Hollywood. In its climactic conclusion, the mystery of his identity is finally unraveled as Antwone returns to Cleveland to locate his mother's and father's surviving family members.A tumultuous and ultimately gratifying tale of self-discovery written in Fisher's gritty yet melodic literary voice, Finding Fish is an unforgettable reading experience.

    Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

    Inspired by the question, "What would be the perfect meal?," Tony sets out on a quest for his culinary holy grail, and in the process turns the notion of "perfection" inside out. From California to Cambodia, A Cooks' Tour chronicles the unpredictable adventures of America's boldest and bravest chef.Fans of Bourdain will find much to love in revisting this classic culinary and travel memoir.

    Comfort Me with Apples picks up Reichl's story in 1978, when she puts down her chef's toque and embarks on a career as a restaurant critic. Her pursuit of good food and good company leads her to New York and China, France and Los Angeles, and her stories of cooking and dining with world-famous chefs range from the madcap to the sublime. Throughout it all, Reichl makes each and every course a hilarious and instructive occasion for novices and experts alike. She shares some of her favorite recipes, while also sharing the intimacies of her personal life in a style so honest and warm that readers will feel they are enjoying a conversation over a meal with a friend.

    Disclosing his story through flashbacks and relying on research from his own case files, Razor pieces together the shattered fragments of his boyhood into a memoir that reads as compellingly as a novel.Abandoned as an infant at the State Public School in Owatonna, Minnesota, Razor was raised by abusive workers who thought of him as nothing more than "a dirty Injun." Cut off from his family and his heritage, he turns inward, forced to learn about the world on his own. After failed attempts to run away from the orphanage, he is indentured by the state to an abusive, reclusive farm family. Beaten, poorly fed, clothed in rags, and worked like slave labor, he struggles to attend high school and begins to dream of another life. Razor's stark and often chilling story, devoid of self-pity, recalls with haunting clarity the years he, like the locust, patiently waited to awaken and emerge.

    Functioning as an atelier, it forecasts the writing of a novel, which does not materialize as such; the journal itself -- a mausoleum of lovers -- comes to take its place. The sensual exigencies and untempered forms of address in this epistolary work, often compared to Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, use the letter and the photograph in a work that hovers between forms, in anticipation of its own disintegration.

    Some are adventurers seeking danger from the back of their horses. Others are travelers discovering the beauties of the countryside they slowly ride through. A few are searching for inner truths while cantering across desolate parts of the planet. Then there is Messanie Wilkins. She was acting on orders from the Lord! In 1954, at the age of 63, Wilkins had plenty to worry about. A destitute spinster in ill health, Wilkins had been told she had less than two years left to live, provided she spent them quietly. With no family ties, no money, and no future in her native Maine, Wilkins decided to take a daring step. Using the money she had made from selling homemade pickles, Wilkins bought a tired summer camp horse and made preparations to ride from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean. Yet before leaving she flipped a coin, asking God to direct her to go or not. When the coin came up heads several times in a row, one of America's most unlikely equestrian heroines set off. What followed was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable equestrian journeys. Accompanied by her faithful horse, Tarzan, Wilkins suffered through a host of obstacles including blistering deserts and freezing snow storms, yet never lost faith that she would complete her 7,000 mile odyssey. "Last of the Saddle Tramps" is thus the warm and humorous story of a humble American heroine bound for adventure and the Pacific Ocean. The classic tale is amply illustrated with photographs.

    In Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary the author traces, in sparse prose, the slow, gradual erosion of her mother's health, her dignity and her life. In seventeen short chapters, from 'anaemia', 'twilight sleep' and 'metastasis', to 'unction', 'cremation' and 'remains', the author describes the family's journey through her mother's illness and death. Written unsentimentally, and with sometimes painful honesty, Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary is an extraordinarily moving commemoration of a life and death.

    For more than twenty years, he has also been writing some of the best essays on food around, now collected in a volume that caused the Santa Fe New Mexican to exclaim: To read this book is to come away convinced that Harrison is a flat-out genius -- one who devours life with intensity, living it roughly and full-scale, then distills his experiences into passionate, opinionated prose. Food, in this context, is more than food: It is a metaphor for life. From his legendary Smart and Esquire columns, to present-day pieces including a correspondence with French gourmet Gerard Oberle, fabulous pieces on food in France and America for Men's Journal, and a paean to the humble meatball, The Raw and the Cooked is a nine-course meal that will satisfy every appetite.Our 'poet laureate of appetite' [Harrison] may be, but the collected essays here reflect much more. -- John Gamino, The Dallas Morning News[A] culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah.... -- Jane and Michael Stern, The New York Times Book ReviewJim Harrison is the Henry Miller of food writing. His passion is infectious. -- Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

    He entered college just as World War II began and dreamed of being a naval aviator. It seemed as if every night his fraternity was having a party to send off a brother to the service. Young Arness got his interview with a naval flight program officer, but his hopes vanished as he was informed that his six foot seven inch height disqualified him automatically. He wrote his draft board asking that they call him up as soon as possible and so he ended up as a private in the famed Third Infantry Division where he earned a Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. Because of his stature, he was chosen to be first off the landing craft (to test the depth of the water) when his division landed at Anzio, Italy. He was subsequently wounded by enemy machine gun fire and spent eighteen months recovering in overseas and stateside hospitals. Later his height would help him strike a commanding figure in the role of U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon of Dodge City. After Arness had toiled in Hollywood for a decade, John Wayne recommended him to CBS executives for the Gunsmoke part (after Wayne turned it down). As the principal performer of Gunsmoke for twenty years (1955-1975), the actor and the character took on mythic proportions--a born leader, honest and strong. Rare is the actor who has been cast in a role that so deeply fits his true self. James Arness gives a full account of his early years, his family, his military career, his film work in Hollywood which included appearances in the cult-favorite science fiction movies Them! and The Thing. He had a long run on Gunsmoke, a role in the highly popular television miniseries How The West Was Won, and his post-theatrical period is also covered. This is the long anticipated, never-before-told account of one of the icons of twentieth-century television. There are many personal revelations of interacting with some of the Gunsmoke family ensemble, such as Miss Kitty, Doc and Festus. His own work as a producer is covered. Throughout are rare, previously unpublished photographs from the author's personal collection. Appendices include comments by show biz colleagues and fellow Gunsmoke alumni, and a sampling of letters received from his legions of fans. As befits the man, this large-size book is a beautifully printed work in accord with the highest library standards--a luxurious and extra-strong cloth binding, acid-free paper, carefully designed photographic and textual layouts and sophisticated typography. Actor and fellow Gunsmoke performer Burt Reynolds has written a foreword to the book.

    .Woodward’s warm, wry account of learning to fly will lift hearts everywhere. BBC2 documentary based on the book - 30 January 2012. Antony Woodward wasn’t interested in flying, he was interested in his image. So in his world of socialising and serial womanising, a microlight plane sounded like the ideal sex aid. So why – once he discovers that he has no ability as a pilot, it costs a fortune and its maddening unreliability loses him the one girl he really wants – does he get more and more hooked?As he monitors the changes to the others in the syndicate; as he learns that there is a literal down-side to cheating in flying exams, shunning responsibility and pretending to know stuff you don’t, the question keeps on surfacing. Why? As the misadventures mount – accidents, tussles with Tornadoes, arrest by the RAF – he keeps thinking he’s worked it out. But it isn’t until The Crash, in which he nearly kills himself and Dan (taking a short-cut in the Round Britain race) that the penny finally drops….Flying is the antidote to modern life he didn’t even know he needed. It’s the supreme way to feel real.

    It's an awkward marriage at best--a young man with a Ph.D. in theology, full of ideas and ambitions, determined to improve his parish and bring it into the twenty-first century, and a community that is "as tightly sealed as a jar of home-canned pickles." In Open Secrets, Lischer tells not only his own story but also the story of New Cana and its inhabitants. With charm, openness, and humor, Lischer brings to life the clash of cultures and personalities that marks his pastoral tenure, including his own doubts, as well as those of his parishioners, that a twenty-eight-year-old suburban-raised liberal can deal with the troubled marriages, alcoholism, teen sex, inadequate farm subsidies, and other concerns of the conservative, tightly knit community. But the inhabitants of New Cana--lovable, deeply flawed, imperfect people who stick together--open their arms to him in their own way, and the result is a colorful, poignant comedy of small-town life and all it has to offer.

    He had a lot to look forward to-a long career ahead of him in the army, a beautiful girlfriend back home. But those dreams were cut short when his parachute failed to open at eleven thousand feet. He had cracked three vertebrae and come within a fraction of severing his spinal cord. A grueling eight months of physical therapy followed. Bear had to retrain his muscles to do all of the things we take for granted-how to sit, stand, walk, even breathe. Eighteen months after his accident he overcame incredible odds to reach the peak of Everest. THE KID WHO CLIMBED EVEREST is a tale of courage and determination. Bear's quest for funding for his expedition, his seventy days on Everest's southeast face, and a narrow brush with death after a fall into a crevasse at nineteen thousand feet, make the story an essential read for anyone who's ever had a dream and made it come true.

    Sullen and hostile when he entered Dr. Burger’s home, Tiko gradually warmed up, courting her during mating season, nursing her vigilantly through a bout with Lyme disease, and for a while even fighting her husband for her attentions. In time theirs was a relationship of deep mutual trust. The Parrot Who Owns Me is Joanna and Tiko’s story, as well as the story of the science of birds, and of parrots in particular. Woven into the narrative are insights and fascinating revelations from Dr. Burger’s work—not only about parrots, but also about what it means to be human.

    

    We had unity. We had Brandon Burlsworth. He had a total commitment to be the best?" Houston Nutt, Head Football Coach at University Of Arkansas. Brandon Burlsworth could have been just another statistic of a young man who tragically lost his life in a 1999 car crash?just one of the many who was here and now is gone, only to be remembered by family and close friends. But Brandon Burlsworth is remembered by thousands as a Christian who lived as close to the mark as possible while excelling academically (Academic All-American), (All SEC, All-American guard for the Arkansas Razorbacks, selected in the draft to play for the Indianapolis Colts). Most importantly, Brandon Burlsworth excelled at life.

    The reader is caught up in the day-to-day lives of women like Sharifa, Latifa and Marzia, sharing their problems, dramas, the tears and the laughter: whether enjoying a good gossip over tea and fresh nan, dealing with a husband’s desertion, battling to save the life of a one-year-old opium addict or learning how to deliver babies safely. Mary Smith spent several years in Afghanistan working on a health project for women and children in both remote rural areas and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Given the opportunity to participate more fully than most other foreigners in the lives of the women, many of whom became close friends, she has been able to present this unique portrayal of Afghan women – a portrayal very different from the one most often presented by the media.

    In 1969, in the wake of the violence surrounding the civil rights movement, Wilkie left the South and vowed never to live there again. But after traveling the world as a reporter, he returned in 1993, drawn by a deep-rooted affinity with the territory of his youth. Here, he endeavors to make sense of the enormous changes that have convulsed the South for more than four decades. Through vivid recollections of landmark events, Dixie becomes both a striking eyewitness account of history and an unconventional tale of redemption full of beauty, humor, and pathos.

    

    As a student in Atlanta, Vernon Jordan had a summer job driving a white banker around town. During the man's afternoon naps, Jordan passed the time reading books, a fact that astounded his boss. "Vernon can read!" the man exclaimed to his relatives. Nearly fifty years later, Vernon Jordan, long-time civil rights leader, adviser and close friend to presidents and business leaders, remembers the sweeping struggles, changes, and dangers of black life during the civil rights revolution.After attending a predominantly white college in the Midwest and graduating from Howard University Law School, Jordan dedicated himself to the civil rights movement. He led the drive to register black voters in the South and was president of the National Urban League, one of the great civil rights organizations of the era, where he was instrumental in integrating American businesses and providing economic and social support to the expanding black middle class. He survived a white racist's assassination attempt and later became a pillar of America's legal, corporate, and political worlds.But Jordan's life was shaped in his early years, and this book is also a moving testament to the family whose support and courage provided the framework for his achievements. Vernon Can Read! chronicles a life of courage, pride, sacrifice, style, and accomplishment.

    Anton Semyonovich Makarenko, Russian educator and novelist, was born on March 13, 1888, in the town of Belopolye, in Kharkov Gubernia, the Ukraine. Besides being a remarkable teacher, he was a profound theoretician and made a major contribution to Soviet pedagogics. Makarenko was an innovator. He worked out a new and original approach to the methodological foundations of pedagogy, a new theory of discipline - the "discipline of combating and surmounting difficulties" - and a system for the building of character. He laid great stress on the importance of home upbringing, and gave many valuable instructions in this field. To him we owe the first detailed elaboration of the educational significance of the collective. Another innovation was his remarkably profound "system of perspectives," the essence of which he defined in the following words: "Man must have something joyful ahead of him to live for. The true stimulus in human life is the morrow's joy." The Road to Life, in which Makarenko describes life in the Gorky Colony (or, more correctly, the building-up of the colony), and his pedagogical system, was begun in 1925 and completed in 1935, Maxim Gorky much admired this book, which he called "one of the best examples of Soviet literature. The language of the book is vivid, full of imagery, truth and humor, and gives subtle psychological descriptions of the pupils and teachers in the colony. Gorky said that Makarenko "knew how to describe each colonist in a few words, with photographic fidelity."

    They missed the liquidation of their ghetto by mere hours, hiding in a shed all night listening to the screams of their fellow Jews. Then went into Germany and took up work in a hotel housing Gestapo officers. Many close escapes and daring moments make this book chilling.

    In this powerful and inspiring story, Steele tells the story of his hard-won recovery from schizophrenia and how activism and advocacy helped him regain his sanity and go on to give hope and support to so many others like him. His recovery began with a small but intensely dramatic moment. One evening in the spring of 1995, shortly after starting on Risperdal, a new antipsychotic medicine, he realized that the voices that had tormented him for three decades had suddenly stopped. Terrified but also empowered by this new freedom, Steele rose to the challenge of creating a new life. Steele went on to become one of the most vocal advocates of the mentally ill, earning the respect not only of patients and families but also of professionals and policymakers all over America through his tireless devotion to a cause that transformed his life and that of countless others. The Day the Voices Stopped will endure as Ken Steele's testament for all who struggle with this heartbreaking disease.

    As the son walks in his father's footsteps, he uncovers a hidden past: he learns of his father's brutal imprisonment, his fortunate release, and his fierce resistance work. This book is also a story of modern Prague and the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution. Hurka takes us with him into the heart of Prague, the "Old Town" quarter where Kafka lived, and the lesser-known streets where his father fought for democracy.Fields of Light is finally a loving tribute to a father, a meditation on the relationship between truth and resistance, a tale of personal sacrifice and endurance -- and of history reborn after extraordinary totalitarian efforts to erase it.

    Using the gifts of a talented novelist and reporter, Hillerman draws brilliant portrait not just of his life, but of the world around him.

    David Powell, for many years curator of the world-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium, tells the story of his life as a pioneering aquarist. From handling great white sharks to transporting delicate fish on bumpy airplanes to night diving for fish in the Indian Ocean, A Fascination for Fish describes many of the mind-boggling challenges that make modern aquariums possible and offers an intriguing glimpse beneath the ocean's surface. Powell's career in diving and aquarium development goes back to the beginning of modern methods in both areas. From the early techniques he devised to get fish into aquariums alive and healthy to his later exploratory dive to a depth of eleven hundred feet in a two-person submarine, Powell's action-packed narrative inspires laughter, wonder, and philosophical reflection. A Fascination for Fish also includes many stories about Powell's diving adventures on the California coast, in the Sea of Cortez, and in many remote and exotic locations around the world.

    Now that at long last he has written this book, I find it no wonder that he has painted with his pen.... Among the tens and hundreds of books I have read about the pre-Shoah and post-Shoah period... Bak's book is unique. Despite being suffused with a sense of loss, horror, degradation, and death, it is ultimately a sanguine, funny book, full of the love of life, rocking with an almost cathartic joy. At times I found myself bursting out laughing... a marvelous ode, a colorful hymn to the forces of life, love, creation, and the joys of the senses. --From the Foreword by Amos OzIn Painted in Words internationally renowned artist Samuel Bak sets aside his brushes to narrate the stories of his life--as a child in Nazi-occupied Vilna, as a youth in European refugee camps, and as a maturing artist in Israel, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. With gentle humor, the child prodigy of the faraway past and the accomplished artist of today engage in a spirited dialogue from which emerges a self-portrait of "The Artist as a Young--and middle-aged and aging--Survivor." The brilliance, vision, and virtuosity that Bak brings to his painting are equally in evidence in his writing. This deeply touching work is an important contribution to Holocaust literature and art history.

    The Hollywood image of Dean Martin with a martini in one hand and a woman in the other continues to dominate public perception. Now, Dean's son Ricci reveals the husband and father few people knew, a man who hated parties, adored his mother-in-law, and found utter contentment in a slice of buttered bread. In That's Amore: A Son Remembers Dean Martin, Ricci Martin takes readers on a tour through his childhood, from the star-studded parties to the exploration of "three marriages, eight kids, one family," to the treasured one-on-one time he shared with his father. He also discusses Dean's first meeting with Jerry Lewis and divulges his father's version of the Martin and Lewis breakup. Ricci Martin addresses the key relationships in his father's life, allowing readers to view the Rat Pack years, "The Dean Martin Show," and Dean's divorce from Jeanne through a son's eyes. That's Amore reveals the triumphs, tragedies, and escapades that colored Ricci's childhood, including his brother Dean Paul's death. More than 100 photos from the private Martin family album enhance Ricci Martin's portrait of his father, creating a complete, honest picture of the Rat Pack legend.

    Domestic violence, murdered spouses, abused children, and philandering CPD brass are just some of the topics addressed, topics that officer Gallo dealt with everyday.From her work with gangs, narcotics, the gun task force, and acting as a prostitute, Gina Gallo offers a gritty account of the darker side of the city, giving readers an objective side to the cops, crooks, and victims that comprise a the police cops world.

    in Dallas during its entire run, from 1978 to 1991, Larry Hagman reached a level of fame and recognition that is rare, if not unique. Now the man behind J.R. tells his own story in an autobiography that is at once rowdy and moving, self-searching and scandalous, juicy and a "recovery story" -- and often outrageously funny. Though Larry Hagman is best known for his starring roles in two hugely successful -- and very different -- television series, I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas, his life has been a star act from birth. Born to the theatrical purple as the son of the legendary Mary Martin, Larry Hagman received his first exposure to the heady world of show business through her -- as well as experiencing a childhood that was lavish and glamorous and full of problems. His father was a tough, smart, wealthy Texas lawyer (sound familiar?), his mother Broadway's most beloved leading lady, and the young Larry Hagman was torn between their two very different worlds. After his parents' marriage ended, he was shunted from one boarding school to another, trying to satisfy his father's expectations by working as a cowboy, hunting, and raising hell and still to live up to his mother's expectations in the world of the theater. In the end, theater won out, and, following his mother's example, he began to pursue a career as an actor. Following a stint in a soap opera, he got his big break with I Dream of Jeannie, and from that came instant fame and celebrity, from which he never looked back. Weaving hilarious (and often scandalous) stories about his early years in show business into a personal story that is breathlessly engaging, Larry Hagman shares his behind-the-scenes life with the reader, his star-studded cast of characters including Linda Gray, Victoria Principal, Barbara Eden, Jean Arthur, and Joan Collins, not to mention George C. Scott, Burgess Meredith, Joshua Logan, Jack Nicholson, Sidney Lumet, and Valerie Perrine, to name only a few. But with the success came many temptations, a few of which Larry Hagman succumbed to, and about which he writes candidly and unsparingly in this memoir, including his battle with drugs and alcohol and his subsequent recovery. It was as J.R., however, in the phenomenally successful series Dallas (the second longest-running TV drama in history), that Hagman earned his greatest fame. Taking the reader behind the scenes, he shares many stories of ego clashes, offscreen relationships, and flamboyant behavior durning his work on that series -- and the pain he experienced as drugs and alcohol began to take their toll. In fact the greatest drama in Larry Hagman's life -- after his long, loving, and successful marriage to his wife, Maj -- came when he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and entered into a race against time to find a liver donor. The "recovery" side of his story is not something he takes for granted, having overcome two addictions as well as undergoing a liver transplant in 1995 and a subsequent near-fatal motorcycle accident. His account of these difficulties is at once unflinchingly courageous and matter-of-fact and will be a source of inspiration to many readers. Despite problems that would have stopped most people, Larry Hagman continues to work on television and in film (he made a brilliant appearance in Mike Nichols's film about presidential ambition, Primary Colors) and enjoys life hugely. Dishy, witty, frank, and unsparing of Larry Hagman himself and of others, Hello Darlin' is, like its author, destined for international fame -- a rare memoir by a show-business celebrity that not only makes us

    Terhune, his wife, his beautiful Sunnybank estate, and the legendary collies he wrote about have remained shining memories for the writers millions of loyal fans, who still make pilgrimages to Sunnybank.

    When his beloved older brother commits suicide, Kirk starts running -- running to escape, running to understand, running straight into the hell of Badwater, the ultimate test of endurance equal to five consecutive marathons. From the inferno of Death Valley to the freezing summit of Mt. Whitney, alongside a group of dreamers, fanatics, and virtual running machines, Kirk will stare down his limitations and his fears on a journey inward -- a journey that just might offer the redemption of his deepest and most personal loss.

    The maniacal tilt-a-whirl story of the Posse, where they reveal how they transformed themselves from welfare-scrubs to wicked musical clowns worth millions.

    They were bound for a tiny, remote cottage at the western end of the loch which was to be their home for the next four years. Isolation Shepherd is the moving story of those years. Whether in stalking or gathering sheep for shearing or droving cattle over mountain passes, navigating the loch, in haymaking, finding firewood or cutting the peats, the ever present background splendidly portrayed is the grandeur of the Highlands—sometimes benign and magnificent, at others, harsh and relentless. Iain Thomson's book vividly captures the splendour of one of Scotland's most awesome landscapes, and depicts the numerous incidents that shaped the family's life there before the area was flooded as part of a huge hydro-electric project. This book is the epitaph for a vanished land and a vanished life.

    And so begins another life journey along the spiritual path of one of our favorite authors. Larkin's account is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, exasperating, and exhilarating, and is told with her usual charm and grace. Part travelogue, part spiritual journey, First You Shave Your Head is a lighthearted collection of Buddhist practices and principles that won't fail to inspire and amuse.Author Biography: Geri Larkin lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is an ordained dharma teacher and runs the Right Livelihood Seed Capital Fund, which helps fund Buddhist-based ventures.

    Paying eloquent homage to his parents' extraordinary courage, luck, and hard work while illuminating as never before the experience of 140,000 refugees who came to the United States between 1947 and 1953, Joseph Berger has captured a defining moment in history in a riveting and deeply personal chronicle.

    He tells of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. There follow his years at boarding school where, though unhappy, he developed the intellectual curiosity that would shape his later life. And we hear of his return to London, an emotionally bereft ten-year-old who found solace in his passion for learning. Uncle Tungsten radiates all the delight and wonder of a boy’s adventures, and is an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary young mind.

    This updated Second Edition is designed to provide complex information in a quick, easy-to-use format that is beneficial to students and rehabilitation professionals.Dr. Sharon A. Gutman designed Quick Reference NeuroScience for Rehabilitation Professionals, Second Edition to provide easy-to-understand explanations of complex neurologic phenomena. The text describes basic neuroanatomical structures and functions, neuropathology underlying specific clinical conditions, and theories supporting clinical treatment.Features of the Second Edition:• User-friendly, bulleted outline format• Italicized key concepts for easy scanning and identification• Color illustrations to help visualize the location of neuroanatomical structures• New clinical test questions• New text boxes outlining neurologic conditions and treatments• Updated and expanded glossary with both clinical and neurological termsIncluding accessible information, color illustrations, new test questions, and updated features, Quick Reference NeuroScience for Rehabilitation Professionals: The Essential Neurologic Principles Underlying Rehabilitation Practice, Second Edition is a dynamic text for all students and clinicians in occupational therapy, physical therapy, and other areas of rehabilitation.

    An literary memoir that uses martial arts as a filter for more poignant stories and experiences.

    This annual commute is ostensibly for the purpose of hunting squirrels, but they are seeking more, and in doing so they discover solace and legends in those wet, foggy woods above the Ohio River and in the loveable characters they discover there and in the nearby town of Persimmon Gap. The book offers a fond look back at 1960s small-town America: sweating red metal Coca-Cola coolers filled with bottled soft drinks whose caps are embedded outside the store in an asphalt apron paved with hundreds of flattened bottle caps, country stores where old timers of various shapes and sizes leaned into their stories, fresh-picked tomatoes that were still warm and tasted of the sun, and legendary baseball teams like the Undefeated Persimmon Gap Bobcats. Ellis offers lasting images and sensory paintings, all gleaned from this land where he and his father travelled, hunted, and rested.In the end, it is this simple mantra, offered first by a gravedigger and later by his dying father that settles into the boy's heart: It's important to remember, it's so important to remember.

    She fled him when she was 34 and finally disappeared for good with her daughters at 40, saying an unspoken goodbye to "family, friends, steady employment, credit cards and video rentals." After six years of pleading and demanding that the governments of two countries (Canada and the U.S.), three states, and one province "protect my family from a cyber-savvy stalker with the money to hire a reputed hit man, I was left with one simple choice: kill Roger or disappear." Since June of 1997, Singer and her daughters have remained successfully hidden, in poverty and under assumed names, somewhere in North America. A tangled but peaceful web of white lies and evasive strategies keeps their whereabouts off the official record--and hopefully out of sight of the man who abused and stalked them. Quicksand is the account of how they got to this point. Singer's story demonstrates how spousal abuse--both psychological and physical--is not merely the province of the poor and uneducated, and how it can cripple the confidence and the will of any woman, regardless of class, race, or educational achievement. This vivid and personal testimony explains why women stay in abusive relationships, and how law enforcement and the legal system often betray victims and their children. Singer, a former journalist, freely admits that rage fuels her story. "I will project my voice with passionate fury in honor of the abused women who were killed before their stories could be told," she writes from forced anonymity, "and in the hope that other women might hear me and live." --Svenja Soldovieri

    The room is filled with children who like and respect him, but he has no real friends. He can barely name anyone in his class, and has trouble with the simplest things - recognizing people, pretending, and knowing when people are happy or angry or sad. Much of his life has been filled with anxiety. He is out of step with the world, which to him is mostly a whirlwind that must be actively decoded and put into order. And yet he was only one of seven fourth graders in the United States to ace the National Math Olympiad. In fifth grade he finished second in a national math talent search.That boy is autistic. He is also loving, brilliant and resilient. In this book, his father writes about the joys, fears, frustration, exhilaration, and exhaustion involved in raising his son. He writes about the impact on his family, the travails of navigating the educational system, and the lessons he has learned about life, what it means to connect with other people, and how one builds a life that suits oneself. And, oh, yes, math. Lots about math.

    As a businessman he has successfully built up a multi-million dollar merchandising business. And as coach of Australia's national Rugby Union side, the Wallabies, he has led his team to World Cup and Bledisloe Cup victories, as well as winning the Tri-Nations championship. And he's done it using his own unusual techniques.Forget the red-faced bellowing cliche of a coach in action. Macqueen's style is so relaxed his players nicknamed him Cones - as in, he must have been out the back having some before the match to stay this cool. This is a bloke who gave each of his great, hulking players a single red rose when they reached the finals of the World Cup, as a way of reminding them to take time out from worrying about what would happen next to enjoy what they'd already achieved.Those who work with him or are coached by him cannot speak highly enough of Macqueen's abilities to lead, motivate and direct people to success. And now he shares that philosophy, via this book, and shows how anyone can apply it to business or other areas of life in order to succeed.

    K. Narayan is at his poignant best in The Writerly Life. Unlike his other books, this is not a fiction but a kind of memoir about his journey through the USA. The book is essentially a collection of essays and adaptations from his diary, which has also been published as My Dateless Diary. The Writerly Life opens a window into the real world of R. K. Narayan describing his meetings with famous people and his experiences while writing The Guide. It is rare that we get a chance to actually look into the life of a writer and his thoughts about writing in such a clear and engaging manner.

     From her hit songs in the 1950s and television stardom as Catwoman on Batman in the 1960s to her sold-out shows at New York's Café Carlyle in the 1990s, her Tony-nominated role on Broadway in 1999, and her hilarious performance as Yzma, the villainess in Disney's The Emperor's New Groove in 2000, Eartha Kitt is one of America's most versatile and enduring performers. Now, at seventy-four and still going strong, Kitt reveals her secrets of vitality in Rejuvenate!, an elegant and inspiring book. Seductive, provocative, amusing, and calming, she combines the lessons of her life -- from a difficult childhood in the South and in Harlem to the joys and challenges of her life in the public eye -- to offer this wise window into her incredible mental and physical vigor and an open invitation to the joys of aging in style. Rejuvenate! is a simple, user-friendly guide that doesn't require a gym, a personal trainer, or even exercise equipment. Each of the nine chapters, with titles such as "Bend," "Stretch," and "Rock-and-Roll," features one basic exercise for the body with easy-to-follow instructions and an entertaining, inspiring message for the mind.

    But Datcher had a dream about a very different kind of life - and a second chance to make good on a promise to himself.

    With the help and support of both of his parents, Derek developed a practical program that would assist him in achieving all of his personal and professional aspirations-and now he shares his secrets to success so that you can get closer to living your dream, too. In this inspiring, information-packed book, Derek provides you with the ten lessons that have guided him throughout his life on and off the field, from his dream of being a gifted, hardworking athlete to his goal of becoming an active community leader. Using personal stories from his own life as a student athlete in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and as a Yankee team player, Derek writes about the simple steps that put him on course for success, including:* Setting your goals high and finding the right role models* Being serious but still having fun * Challenging yourself daily and not being afraid to fail* Surrounding yourself with a strong supporting cast Filled with rare family photos and pictures of Derek playing for the Yankees, The Life You Imagine is an intimate look into the life of a superstar athlete -- including the remarkable relationship he has with his family, what it's like to play with the Yankees, and how he's used his baseball celebrity to found the Turn 2 Foundation, a drug and alcohol prevention program for kids.

    Grove. Photos throughout.

    The acclaimed book in which a natural-born storyteller relays the vital lessons and inspiration he has drawn from life's most perfect teachers: children.

    Turning his penetrating journalist’s eye for observance and revelation onto his own life, Murray ventures back through his seventy-plus years with an unsparing honesty and clarity that age has afforded him. Born to God-fearing Scottish parents, Murray grew up with little more than a handshake from his mother and a solidly constructed lack of confidence in his abilities and intellect. A sickly child with no siblings, he had only solitude to grow on–a lonely meal, but one that fed his imagination and his talent for sketching out the subtleties of life that have made his columns so beloved. From his struggles to put himself through college and his vivid experiences as a paratrooper in World War II, to his shaky acceptance of himself as a writer and his survival of immense personal tragedy, Murray addresses issues and emotions that society has long deemed taboo for men of his era: feelings of inadequacy, grief, family dysfunction, and most importantly, the indignities of age. But as he courageously sheds light on the difficult aspects of growing old, he discovers that there is more joy abundant in it than he ever imagined. Whether he is relaying a war story or his poignant ritual of listening for his wife’s breath each morning, Murray never shies away from a truth–no matter how uncomfortable it may be. Propelled forward by the love of his work, a quiet devotion to his family, and an unceasing commitment to understanding his place in the world, he is an elegant reminder that the drive to live fully does not end at retirement. In his hands, aging is adventurous terrain, full of possibilities and unprecedented insight–a time that we spend much of our life fearing but, when reached, bestows upon us unexpected gifts.

    In this astonishing volume of autobiography, John Moriarty's earlier works of mystical philosophy, Dreamtime and Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, are given a biographical grounding. Inhabited by all that he reads and perceives, Moriarty recovers lost forms of sensibility and categories of understanding, reconciling them gloriously within the arc of his life.Nostos is a Greek word meaning 'homecoming'. In its plural form, nostoi, it was the name of an extensive body of literature in ancient Greece about the Greek heroes who returned from the Trojan Wars. Most of this literature has perished, but we do have The Odyssey, describing the long homecoming of Odysseus to Ithaca. Moriarty's book assumes that for various reasons humanity is now exiled from the earth, but by reimagining it and ourselves as involved in a common destiny, it enacts a homecoming, a nostos to it.Nostos is a continuous narrative describing early on how its author lost his world as surely and completely as the Aztecs lost theirs when Cortez came ashore. Thereafter, in places as far apart as neolithic North Kerry and London, Periclean Athens and Blackfoot Dancing Ground, Manitoba and Mexico, Kwakiutl coast and Connemara, the author fights his way to a kind of rest, to a requiem, at the heart of things as they terribly and resplendently are.'The classical, Eastern and Amer-Indian legends that have informed Moriarty's life are recreated or re-enacted in this deeply personal document, which is paradoxically rich in encounters with the physical world and tender episodes of love and loss, while giving us a disturbing insight into the terrors and rare ecstasies of the hermit's lonely struggle.' - Tim Robinson

    Among the family, friends, and colleagues with whom he corresponded rank such eminent names as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Jimmy Carter.

    Like many artists, Munch did not limit himself to visual expression. For much of his career, he wrote almost as much as he painted, and many of his major art works began as literary sketches. However, as this gorgeous and unusual volume makes clear, Munch did not write to explain his art, but as an extension of it. Poul Erik Tojner's careful and insightful analysis of Munch's writings, many of which have been preserved in the Munch Museum in Oslo, reveals the deep connection between writing and painting in Munch's life. Ingeniously organized by themes, the book presents beautiful reproductions of paintings, prints, and journal excerpts as they deepen our understanding of this compelling artist and provide interesting clues to the themes he returned to again and again.

    Raised in a segregated Alabama mining camp, she eventually would become a renowned Indo-Tibetan scholar and professor of religion at Wesleyan University. Along the way, she took part in an armed takeover of a Cornell University building during a black student protest, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham, and, ultimately, found peace within a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Hers is a deeply personal journey of racial and spiritual healing that "will move anyone who is compelled by the examined life." (Publishers Weekly, starred review) "Jan Willis's honest, lucid, mindful, and heartful account of her amazing life thus far, its struggles and woundings, its triumphs and joys, is certainly the roar of a lioness of truth-awakening, empowering, inspiring! Listen to it with pride and pleasure!" (Robert Thurman, author of Inner Revolution) "Willis writes frankly about family, race, spirituality, and finding grace among life's most difficult challenges. Dreaming Me is more honest and fascinating than anything I've read in a long time." (David Pesci, author of Amistad) "Intensely felt...highly personal...A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism." (Kirkus Reviews)

    'And so is bloody spinifex.'Dune is a Four-letter Word tells the story of Griselda and Reg Sprigg's pioneering desert adventures - not only in the Simpson Desert but all over the vast Australian outback. Griselda's story is also the story of Arkaroola Sanctuary, how she, with her husband, Reg, turned a drought-stricken sheep station into the magnificent flora and fauna reserve and tourist mecca it is today.

    Then everything changed. Peter opened his heart to the Scottish Fold kitten and their adventures to Paris, Fire Island, and in the subways of Manhattan took on the color of legend and mutual love. The Cat Who Went to Paris proves that sometimes all it takes is paws and personality to change a life.In A Cat Abroad, Peter Gethers recounts the further adventures of Norton, the extraordinary cat with the great Scottish Fold ears, who finds new worlds and people to conquer. Norton, who charmed even the most avowed cat haters with his antics in the best-selling The Cat Who Went to Paris, now hightails it to the south of France - stopping off all over Europe along the way - for a year with his favorite human. As always, Norton astounds those around him with his calm, uncatlike demeanor and succeeds in becoming the object of everyone's affections. In America, Norton goes on the TV talk-show circuit, finds himself on the "A" list of desirable celebrities who stay at the ultra-chic Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, and is the star of a party at Spago, where superstar chef Wolfgang Puck presents him with a Pounce pizza. When Norton and Peter tour the Continent, Norton leaves his mark on Paris, where he encounters five not-so-friendly dogs and a devious chef; Italy, where he almost starts a war over an uneaten sardine; Holland, where he tours the canals; the Swiss Alps, where he has his first raclette dinner; and, of course, Provence, where over the course of a year he hikes in the mountains, makes friends with a goatherder (and his goats), dines in three-star restaurants, and, generally, becomes the most recognizable new inhabitant of the area since Peter Mayle decided to leave London. Along the way, Norton and his human companion face change and learn to understand the problems and the pleasures that come with growing up and growing older together. Like its predecessor, A Cat Abroad is funny, touching, and wise.

    Her ten essays, accompanied by 42 illustrations (from a nude by Titian, to family photos, to a famous image of Marilyn Monroe) and a dozen of her poems, focus on specific aspects of Mennonite life. Often drawing from historical episodes or family stories, Kasdorf pursues themes of martyrdom, landscape, silence, the body, memory, community, and the struggle to articulate experience with a voice that is both authentic to the self and a conversation with her traditional Mennonite and Amish-Mennonite background.

    Their recollections in this delightful memoir make vividly real the Ayn Rand they knew so well.

    Life lessons. Boating culture. This book takes on these subjects and more. Readers will learn about rivers and the people who love them, not only as thrill rides and vacation destinations, but also as rich ecosystems and spiritual wellsprings. As Rebecca Lawton says, "To those who come to know them well, rivers are home . . . Being on the river every day, all summer, for more than a decade, taught me to read water - to psyche out where rocks hid in riffles, find safe passage in inscrutable rapids, and keep moving in flat water." Here are the countless lessons to be learned from rivers and currents, living in the river community, and becoming part of a boating family for life.

    Delphine Red Shirt has delicately woven the life stories of her mother, Lone Woman, and Red Shirt’s great-grandmother, Turtle Lung Woman, into a continuous narrative that succeeds triumphantly as a moving, epic saga of Lakota women from traditional times in the mid–nineteenth century to the present. Especially revealing are Turtle Lung Woman’s relationship with her husband, Paints His Face with Clay, her healing practice as a medicine woman, Lone Woman’s hardships and celebrations growing up in the early twentieth century, and many wonderful details of their domestic lives before and during the early reservation years.

    La Motte's The Backwash of War (1916) and Borden's The Forbidden Zone (1929) present in powerful, vivid and often haunting prose each woman's acute observations of the stark realities of battle and the severe conditions under which military medicine is practised.

    Brenda Peterson was raised in the High Sierras on a national forest lookout station, and wildlife had a daily, defining influence on her life. Peterson explores her deep connection with animals, from watching grizzlies in Montana's Rockies, to keeping Siberian huskies as pets in New York City, to her work for the restoration of wild wolves. Her lively storytelling bridges the worlds of human and animal, as she fascinates us with intimate stories of her studies of wild dolphins, whales, and orcas. Peterson reveals how animal bonds have enriched her life and led her toward a wider epiphany: As a species we cannot live without other animals. "[A] wealth of fascinating anecdotes and insights...[an] engaging memoir."—Publishers Weekly

    . . . This book is a treasurehouse."—Maxine KuminLyrical, affecting, and blended with intelligent speculation on national history and literary legacy, Distance and Directions contains tender and lucidly-detailed homages to Fred Astaire's hands, Kitchen's aging father, the color blue and familiar and dreamed-about places.Judith Kitchen has also written Only the Distance: Essays on Time and Memory, and has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Anhinga Prize in Poetry, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at SUNY-Brockport.

    Kron's roller-coaster ride through her family album carries her back and forth from her journey to Auschwitz to her septuagenarian father, a Holocaust survivor, to her Michigan family's annual pilgrimage tot he Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio, to her brother's engagement and subsequent marriage to his Internet bride. Struggling to make sense of her father's mortality, her own relationship to his destroyed world, and the absurdities and quirks of everyday life, Kron rises and falls between the hilariously witty and the deeply felt.

    A critical examination of the life and work of Malcolm X, as well as his profound impact on the political, ideological, and cultural life of the 20th century.-- CMG Worldwide represents the Malcolm X family/estate, with a vested interest in keeping the Malcolm X name prominent in the mind of the public.Critical Lives: Malcolm X will cover: the childhood of Malcolm Little in the Depression-era Midwest; the rise and fall of "Detroit Red" -- Malcolm's chaotic adolescence as a petty criminal and street hustler; the prison years -- the rebellious, angry, headstrong inmate they called Satan; Malcolm's religious and social allegiance with the Black Muslims (Nation of Islam); the founding and editing by Malcolm of the Nation of Islam (NOI) national newspaper; Malcolm as organizer, teacher, and political advocate -- and Malcolm as husband and father; from Malcolm X to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz -- his attacks on the Civil Rights Movement and his break with the NOI; and the final year -- the surveillance by the FBI and CIA, the assassination at the Audobon Ballroom.

    DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, AmherstThis detailed study of the internal workings of the Nation of Islam under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan examines the evolution of the organization since 1977 and its strange ideological menu of Black Nationalism, political-economic development, anti-Semitism, and conservative Republican ideals. Vibert White maintains that Farrakhan’s Nation has become a cult that utilizes black nationalistic and religious dogma and its ability to create political and racial controversy to exploit poor and working-class black Americans for the leaders’ economic and political gain. At the heart of Inside the Nation is White’s chronicle of his own sojourn during the 1980s and 1990s as a registered Muslim--from his days as a foot soldier in the Fruit of Islam, the Nation’s military organization, through his rise to the status of minister and advisor to the leadership.  Included are White’s dealings with such leaders as Louis Farrakhan, Akbar Muhammad, Khallid Muhammad, and Benjamin Chavis Muhammad and his involvement in such activities as the Million Man March. As one who traveled for the organization throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the United States, White was able to observe the leadership and the operation of the group at close hand. He reveals for the first time the detailed structure of NOI’s business and religious operation. He explores and separates the Nation of Islam, the religious arm that is incorporated only in Chicago, from the Final Call, its business center operated only by the Farrakhan family.   As a professional historian, White was able to separate the passion of the group’s rhetoric from its real objectives, which centered on building a personal empire for Louis Farrakhan.Vibert L. White, Jr., is professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield.  He has lectured extensively on the Nation of Islam and has published articles in the Journal of Caribbean Studies, Psychohistory Review, Journal of Illinois History, UCLA Black Law Journal, Chicago Defender, and Cincinnati Enquirer.

    Parks and his wife were attracted to Tuscarora's isolation and beautiful setting, and they believed that it might be a healthy environment in which to raise their two small sons. This is Parks' account of his family's life in Tuscarora, a tiny settlement whose population even forty years later numbers fewer than twenty permanent residents.Parks created a pottery school that attracts students from around the world and developed for himself an international reputation as the creator of powerful, innovative works in clay. Meanwhile, he and his family had to master the skills required of those who choose to live in the back country--growing and hunting their own food, renovating or building from scratch the structures they needed for residences or studios, resolving conflicts with neighbors, inventing their own amusements. The transformation from middle-class urbanity to small-town simplicity is, as Parks reveals, a lurching and sometimes hilarious process, and the achievement of self-sufficiency is similarly fraught with unexpected challenges.

    Through his wildly funny and thought-provoking correspondence, Trumbos son has created a touching portrait of an extraordinary man. A full-cast production featuring: Jeff Corey, Harry Groener, Christopher Trumbo and Paul Winfield.

    Along her way, her remarkable speeches, rich with wisdom, love, and political insight, transformed individuals and communities and jump-started a full-blown movement."There's a cancer, and it's killing our democracy. A poor man has to sell his soul to get elected. I cry for this country."On February 29, 2000, ninety-year-old Doris "Granny D" Haddock completed her 3,200-mile, fourteen-month walk from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. She walked through 105-degree deserts and blinding blizzards, despite arthritis and emphysema. Along her way, her remarkable speeches -- rich with wisdom, love, and political insight -- transformed individuals and communities and jump-started a full-blown movement. She became a national heroine.On her journey, Haddock kept a diary -- tracking the progress of her walk and recalling events in her life and the insights that have given her. Granny D celebrates an exuberant life of love, activism, and adventure -- from writing one-woman feminist plays in the 1930s to stopping nuclear testing near an Eskimo fishing village in 1960 to Haddock’s current crusade. Threaded throughout is the spirit of her beloved hometown of Dublin/Peterborough, New Hampshire -- Thornton Wilder’s inspirations for Grovers Croner in Out Town -- a quintessentially American center of New England pluck, Yankee ingenuity and can-do attitude.Told in Doris Haddock’s distinct and unforgettable voice, Granny D will move, amuse, and inspire readers of all ages with its clarion message that one person can indeed make a difference.

    His son is a child of the times, chasing his own dreams: girls, long hair, politics, and independence. And both chase the same dream: each other's elusive love.This is a familiar story uniquely told, in a voice that perfectly captures America at its most turbulent, an era that continues to define the largest generation in American history. MY FATHER'S CABIN chronicles life in America as the Greatest Generation gives way to the Me Decade, as responsibility gives way to self-fulfillment-and then back again, as responsibility becomes self-fulfillment.

    Humor and hard won lessons in life and love infuse this luminous true story of a family cast off but determined to build a new life.

    Five to ten paces takes me over the track, and now I scan the creek ahead trying to peer through the underbrush, to detect signs of enemy presence. Jesus, it's quiet; unnaturally quiet...another obviously more urgent hiss is sent out to attract my attention. Looking back over my shoulder I see the enemy soldier immediately; he is on the track looking directly at me...apparently oblivious to my presence. Has he seen me? screams through my brain. No!... Suddenly, the bastard takes off like a startled jackrabbit. Couldn't hold it together any longer, I think, as I try to get a shot in-but it's hopeless, no point in firing...in any case the remainder of the patrol is now thundering towards me.With his remarkably observant eye, Terry O'Farrell's personal account of his career as an SAS soldier vividly captures not only the military actions of his time in Vietnam, but the human aspects of soldiering-from surviving the intense selection process and training, to dealing with the ever-present fear of combat.Terry relives the long tense stretches on patrol in the jungle, ears ever alert to the sounds of the surrounding terrain and being caught by surprise and sudden contact with the enemy. He also entertains his readers with colourful tales of his experiences off the battlefield-the larrakin pranks during training, visits to Mama San and her girls, and the friendship and mutual trust that forms between soldiers.An absorbing, frank and humorous reflection, Behind Enemy Lines is a first-hand insight into the mind of a young SAS soldier.'Captures the true day to day existence of an Infantry solider...I had tears rolling down my face at some of the shenanigans...to being brought back to the nasty reality that was the war we all knew. The humour when setting up either a fellow soldier or an instructor and suffering the consequences or feeling Oh so smug when you got away with it makes for great reading.' - Bill McLaughlin