Memoirs of a Former Fatty: How one girl went from fat to fit


Gemma Reucroft - 2016
    I was also so chronically unfit that I couldn’t manage more than one flight of stairs without getting seriously out of breath. I was eating my way to a whole host of health problems and my knees were knackered. Now nearly four years on, I am over 80lbs lighter and a whole heck of a lot fitter. I’m now training to be a Personal Trainer so that I can help other people like me. This is why I have written this book. Along the way I learned a lot, and came up with some ideas of my own about how and why people lose weight….or don’t. This is my story.

Center of Attention: A True Crime Memoir


Jami D. Brown Martin - 2020
    The photo looks completely out of place on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list where it’s been since December, 8, 2007. For eight of those years, Jason appeared directly beside Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden is long gone, but Jason is still wanted for armed robbery and murder.For years, his sister, Jami D. Brown Martin has watched the true crime programs and read the amateur investigative blogs devoted to Jason, his crime, and the efforts to apprehend him knowing the story wasn’t as simple, nor was it just Jason’s. To be the sister, brother, or relative of one of the world’s most wanted men is to live every day with the horrible truth and many consequences of his brutal act.CENTER OF ATTENTION is the story of a former Mormon missionary turned murderer. It is also a riveting look behind the facade of the genetically blessed, seemingly prominent and pious Brown family of Laguna Beach, California. It is a tale of the family patriarch, John Brown, who disappeared without a trace ten years before his son. More important, it is the gripping and ultimately hopeful story of the sister of one of the world’s most wanted fugitives and her journey to accept that despite being a product of the same crazy environment as her brother, her life and path are her own.

I was somebody before this....


Kitti Jones - 2017
    I created S.P.Y ( stop protecting your abuser) after discovering I was apart of a growing community of women and young girls who had been victimized by the same famous and powerful man. I became infuriated when communicating with several of his past victims when I realized we were all dealing with the same fear and shame and we were all too afraid of the questions and the victim shaming that follows after you tell! Why are you telling now? Are you after money? She doesn't look like a victim, she isn't his type, she's not pretty, she's a groupie she deserved it, she's not crying in the interview she must be lying!! Watching past victims endure so much backlash it made many of us go into a deeper depression and pretend it never happened, this allowed our abuser to recruit and victimize more girls and women over the years to come. Inside, I take you on a journey, sharing my life and my career before Robert Kelly, and then sharing my life as it was living with him. Never before seen photos, and information never revealed.

Ronaldo: Rise Of The Legend. The incredible story of one of the best soccer players in the world.


Roy Brandon - 2016
    On an almost daily basis we see hear his name on the news, see his face on any number of TV commercials, and marvel at the magic show he puts on every weekend when he takes to the field. He is a celebrity whose image and influence affect our popular culture and a soccer star that has been compared with some of the world´s best athletes. But Cristiano was not always the popular, mega-celebrity, soccer superstar that he is today. The success that he enjoys has come from years of hard work and sacrifice that have helped him overcome many obstacles and difficulties in his pathIn this book, we´re going to take a look at the life of Cristiano, beginning at the time he was rising star whose career was threatened by a strange heart condition, right up until his third Ballon D´or recognition. We will also follow Cristiano off of the field to see his impact on popular culture and his life beyond soccer.

Behind The Door: the Real Story of Loretta Young


Edward J Funk - 2015
    Then, in 2012, Linda Lewis, Loretta Young’s daughter-in-law, called, urging me to finally bring this book to full life. I’ll be forever grateful to Loretta Young, a guarded woman by nature, who finally decided to tell a very personal story. In doing so, she enlisted the help of her three sisters and life-long friends. These people have all passed on, but their voices remain vividly in the present.Excerpts pertaining to Loretta’s relationship with Clark GableGable arrived at Loretta’s train compartment uninvited. She recalled,” I allowed him in as I would have any member of the crew, thinking he was there for a visit. He had other intentions. Very persistent intentions. He wasn’t rough, but I kept saying no, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Loretta received a phone call from Ria Gable a few weeks later. Loretta recalled, "I was in Mama's room and I picked up the phone. Mrs. Gable said, 'This is very presumptuous of me, but you may or may not know that there are rumors flying around town about you and my husband.'”In 1998, when Loretta was eighty-five, she was watching television with Edward Funk. There was the mention of date-rape on the news, and she asked him what exactly did that mean. He explained to the best of his ability. The following day, Loretta called her daughter-in-law, Linda and said. “I know now that there was a word for what happened to me with Clark.”Clark Gable arrived on the set of THE CRUSADES. Loretta recalled, “He waited until I was through and then offered to take me home. We went for a drive up in the Hollywood Hills. He didn’t say much, but it was apparent that he was agitated. With the long silences, I felt very uncomfortable and finally felt the pressure to say something. I blurted out, ‘Would it make any difference if I told you that I wasn’t pregnant?’ He turned and looked at me and then asked, ‘Well, are you or aren’t you?’ I felt like such a fool. I didn’t know why I had said that except that I had tried to think of something to say he wanted to hear, my inherent need to please taken to an illogical length. I had to tell him that I was pregnant. His look toward me was one of total exasperation, and very little was said as he drove me home.” There would be some phone calls in the interim, but it would be more than a year before Loretta would see Clark Gable again. Loretta’s sister, Sally, "I remember taking an odd route to get there (the house in Westwood where Loretta and the baby were in hiding). My mother didn't approve that I was going at all because of all the secrecy, but I was dying to see the baby. She was very big by the time I did. I just loved her looks and kept saying, ‘Oh Loretta, I hope I have a baby that looks just like this.' In response to my enthusiasm about Judy, Loretta referred to Gable’s visit earlier in the week, the first time he had seen his daughter, and said, 'Yes, and do you know after all that has gone on, all that we've gone through, instead of having any interest in his daughter, he tried to knock me down on the bed! Can you imagine, Sally? That bastard! Who the hell does he think he is?' And I thought, 'With all that's happened, she thinks he's a bastard. He didn't understand that Loretta was a human being that had suffered very much.”Loretta acted like she couldn’t have been more flattered that MGM’s two biggest male stars (Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy) would come to see her (on the set of UNGUARDED HOUR). Under her smile she thought differently. She reflected, “I thought how different these two men were.

Clean: A story of addiction, recovery and the removal of stubborn stains


Michele Kirsch - 2019
    And yet, when she finally does have something like that life, as a wife and mother in 1980s London, she is the one blaring music from her room, necking vodka and valium and making an almighty mess of her home and family.Cleaning other people’s houses, eventually, is the only option left. At 50 years old, post rehab, living alone in a Hackney bedsit, Michele finds herself finishing her working life as she had begun, “in a dumb job that you do when you can’t really do anything else...”This is a remarkable, powerful, and often unbearably funny memoir in which cleaning and getting clean intertwine as a strange and magical form of redemption. Michele Kirsch is a Nora Ephron for the modern age.

A Simple Life: Living off grid in a wooden cabin in France


Mary-Jane Houlton - 2021
    They were already used to a simple life, having spent the last three years living on their boat in France for the summer seasons, and returning to the UK and their caravan for the winters. This tiny cabin would now be their new home for the winter months, taking them a step further along the road to self-sufficiency. They had no electricity, no kitchen, no bathroom or bedroom and the loo was a bucket in a shed, but the property came with five acres of field and woodland.From now on their lives would be simple, pared back to the basics, but they found that an off-grid lifestyle was by no means an uncomfortable experience. Responsibilities didn’t disappear but they changed, becoming less onerous. There was more time to think, and to appreciate the natural world around them. Living in such rural isolation, each day brought something new to marvel at: deer browsing in the field at dusk, salamanders on the doorstep, owls calling by night.If their own world felt increasingly magical, the outside world was far from it. They had moved to a foreign country at an historic time, living through a pandemic and adapting to the day-to-day implications of Brexit.A Simple Life doesn’t just follow Mary-Jane and Michael as they settle into their new lives, it also raises questions about what really matters to people. What makes us happy? How does it feel to have few possessions? Will life become unbearable without a flushing toilet?Thought-provoking and amusing, this book opens a window onto a different way of living. Mary-Jane shares a wealth of information and, if you have ever found yourself longing for a simpler life, this might tempt you to take those first tentative steps on the journey.

Struck: A Husband’s Memoir of Trauma and Triumph


Douglas Segal - 2018
    Miraculously, his daughter was unharmed, but his wife faced a series of life-threatening injuries, including the same one that famously left Christopher Reeve paralyzed. Following the accident, Segal began sending regular email updates to their circle of friends and family—a list that continued to grow as others heard of the event and were moved by the many emotional and spiritual issues it raised. Segal's compelling memoir is an intimate and honest chronicle built around these email updates, and is a profound example of how people show up for one another in times of crisis.Alternatingly harrowing, humorous, heartbreaking, and hopeful, this is an uplifting tribute to love, determination, and how the compassion of community holds the power to heal, serving as an inspiring testament to the resilience of the human spirit when faced with pain and adversity.

Stories I've Heard, Characters I've Met, & Lies We've Told in My 44 Alaskan Years


Tom Brion - 2016
    An Off the Grid lodge owner in Fish Lakes, Alaska, Tom enthralls roomfuls of guests every year from the Lower 48 and around the world with tales of his adventures, foibles, and SNAFUs in 44 years living in the Alaskan wilderness. From his start as a Pennsylvania farmboy who ran off to join the United States Air Force, to his arrival in Alaska with less than a hundred dollars in his wallet and a growing family in his back seat, to his forty years as a Bush pilot and his accidental introduction to the fishing lodge business, to his multiple brushes with death, hardship, and questionable characters, Tom Brion has a story to cover it all. A pioneer in sustainable homesteading and off-the-Grid living, Tom Brion built his first lodge in Alaska on five acres in the Lake Creek area, in 1979, and continues to this day building and working heavy machinery 60 miles from any road. Born in 1941, Tom has collected 74 years of humorous, heart-wrenching, and sometimes mind-blowing stories of traveling, hunting, and exploring the backcountry of Alaska in the pilot’s seat of a Vietnam-era Cessna Birddog. A biography in the form of short life stories, Tom Brion’s memoir takes us to a rural Bush life where people live off the land, drill their own wells, put out their own forest fires, and depend on their neighbors to pick up their mail. Surrounded by nature, Tom continues to fly, plow, run his bulldozer, and wrangle his subsistence fishwheel up the river every year in the Skwentna area of Alaska, where temperatures in winter drop to 45 below zero and summers can see entire months without rain. Follow him in this (mostly) nonfiction anthology of (somewhat) true stories from the Last Frontier as he gives the straight scoop about bears, outhouses, farming, flooding, fishing, moose, guns, and aviation in the 49th State.An avid hunter, outdoorsman, fisherman, and jack of all trades, Tom documents his life with photos and illustrations that detail an epic adventure from start to finish.

The Pink Steering Wheel Chronicles


Laura Fahrenthold - 2018
    Laura Fahrenthold knew that to cope with her painful loss, she needed to do it on her own terms. So she bought an RV, took her kids and their dog, and drove across the United States and Canada in search of healing and understanding. A career in journalism fills The Pink Steering Wheel Chronicles with insight and wit as Laura shares her adventures and misadventures, her deeply-layered love story, and her hilarious slice of life dispatches during her 30,152-mile road trip.

Martin Scorsese: A Journey


Mary Pat Kelly - 1991
    - Includes a section on the making of the much-anticipated Gangs of New York starring Leonardo DiCaprio- With an updated chronology, filmography, and index

Gravity


Norman Ollestad - 2015
    Anton, a remote village nestled in the glittering and dangerous peaks of the Austrian Alps. There, he befriends the local clique of ski bums and fills his days with endless, exhilarating skiing, and his nights flirting with the prettiest girls at the bars. But in the quiet moments, Norman cannot escape the painful memories of his challenging, adrenaline-addicted father who took him to St. Anton fifteen years earlier, and who died in a terrible plane crash of which Norman, at the age of eleven, was the sole survivor. In Gravity, Ollestad transports us to those thrilling days in the Alps, and reveals how his search to find greater meaning in his rudderless life helped him discover the relationships that make life worth living.Norman Ollestad was born in Los Angeles in 1967 and grew up in Malibu. He studied creative writing at UCLA and attended UCLA’s undergrad Film School. His writing has appeared in Outside, Men’s Journal and Time. He is married and has two children—a son and daughter—and lives in Venice, California.Cover design by Adil Dara

Savile: The Beast: The Inside Story of the Greatest Scandal in TV History


John McShane - 2013
    But on October 3rd, 2012, ITV broadcast an investigation into Savile's behavior called Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile. In it they revealed the true, predatory, and evil man behind the popular TV persona. In the documentary, several women alleged he sexually abused them when they were underage. This sparked a flurry of allegations in the following days and weeks from other alleged victims. So far police have been called to investigate reports of abuse on young children from as long ago as 1959 and anticipate the number of victims to be in the region of 300. But how Savile was allowed to get away with such monstrous crimes for so long has been the subject of immense debate and has led to the investigations of several British institutions. The BBC has been criticized and is hosting an internal investigation into how Savile's behavior was never called into question and how abuse allegations during his long career at the corporation failed to be flagged. An investigation is also underway into the canceling of a Newsnight program in 2011. The Department of Health has also said it will investigate its own conduct in appointing Savile to lead a "taskforce" overseeing the management of high security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor in 1998. Abuse is also alleged to have taken place at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and Leeds General Infirmary, where Savile volunteered. This is a well researched and informative look at how a predatory pedophile was allowed to go unnoticed for so long and to breach a nation's trust is such a cruel and evil way

Footballer: My Story


Kelly Smith - 2012
    She has been called the Zinedine Zidane of the women's game. She has scored more goals for England than any other player in history. Yet since she was old enough to kick a ball, Kelly Smith has had to battle every step of the way to play the game she loves. Girls were not welcome when Kelly first started out, practising for hours to hone her sublime skills, but after outshining all the boys in the teams she played in, she became a pioneer for English women's football. A teenage sensation and the nation's first professional footballer, Kelly was soon a star, a genius with the ball at her feet, but a series of injuries led to periods of depression and then alcoholism as she struggled to cope without the sport. As she nears the end of her glittering career, Kelly now tells the heartfelt story of her triumphs and tragedies, of how she beat her demons to put England on the world football map. It is a tale of overcoming prejudice to live your dream, and of how it feels and what it means to be a woman at the very top of her game.

Do Not Go Gentle. Go to Paris.: Travels of an Uncertain Woman of a Certain Age


Gail Schilling - 2019
    So begins the journey through France of an optimistic, infinitely curious, 62-year-old woman, who seeks to ransom her self-confidence and learn how to age. Deftly weaving scenic description with sketches of feisty Frenchwomen and flashbacks of older women she has admired, Gail draws wisdom from people and places that have gracefully endured the passing years. By the time she reaches the Mediterranean village that once existed only on her calendar, she feels revitalized. Her refreshed self-concept takes a hit, however, when her beloved proves fickle and a train strike maroons her on the edge of the sea. By the end of her journey, Gail recognizes the joie de vivre beneath the wrinkles of bygone beauty in French women. Now she awakens to her own joy of living and finds that it has no expiration date.