Weeks later he testified against his former team mate Lance Armstrong, as part of the USADA investigation.In a stunning piece of writing, Barry explores the dreams and passion of a young, idealistic cycling fan from Toronto - what it was then like to ride as a teammate alongside such giants of the sport as Lance Armstrong, Mark Cavendish, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, and how those dreams were tainted early on in his career by a sport in crisis.But it's also the story of his eleven years riding clean, before and after his time in the notorious American Postal Team. What was it like to head for Europe at such a young age, and what was it like to escape the environment of doping, to try and start again, all the time aware that past actions may one day catch up with him?Offering a unique and elegiac insight into the life and mind of a professional sportsman - the pressures, sacrifices, fears, crashes, injuries and neuroses - Cycles of the Heart is a classic, must-read book for cycling and sports fans alike.

    16 pages of photos. Author Taylor confronts the comic genius with both humor and pathos.

    She was happily married and she had her future all planned out. They would have two adorable children, while she made award winning programmes for television. Until the day her husband announced he was being sent to live and work in an African country she had never heard of. When she came to the notice of a Colonel in the Government, it made life very complicated, and from there things started to escalate from bad to worse. If Amie could have seen that one day she would be totally lost, fighting for her life, and enduring untold horrors, she would never have stepped foot on that plane

    World travel? Adios. Solo explorations in the mountains? Ciao. Creative outlets? She wondered, are diapers my new white canvas? Immersed in a whirlwind of sleeplessness and spit-up, she was madly in love with her new baby, yet also felt her adventurous spirit and core identity crumbling.So Carrie laced up her boots and set out on a soul-searching journey, with revelations near and far. Inside a local Walmart, she realized that new motherhood is like traveling to a foreign country, with a new vocabulary, unknowable customs, and extreme jetlag. Lying in a yurt in the Colorado forest, she came to terms with her postpartum depression. While sailing on a gulet off the coast of Turkey, she examined feelings of guilt about leaving her child in pursuit of adventure. And then, while perched in a handsome stranger’s motorcycle sidecar in the Mexican jungle, she found herself face-to-face with her central quandary: Domesticity vs. Wanderlust.Finally, she discovered she could—and should—have both.

    14-year-old Stephen is living with his family. Stephen and his friend Marcel collect souvenirs from strafed convoys and crashed Messerschmitts. Then they are arrested and imprisoned for sabotage and threatened with deportation or the firing squad. Upon his release, and still only 16, Stephen is recruited by the French Resistance. This is his story.

    One bike. One tent. One hell of an adventure. Biking from Alaska to Mexico solo is hard enough. But when you throw in bad weather, flat tires, hair-raising roadways, and unpredictable grizzly bears, only a fool would keep going. Fortunately, Jerry Holl was just the fool for this particular two-wheeled odyssey. Coming off a lifetime of corporate positions, he wasn't exactly prepared--his most trusted companion on the trip was a bike he didn't know how to fix. But inexperience and lack of a concrete plan didn't stop him. For fifty-one days, Holl pedaled his way across two countries, encountering everything weird and wondrous North America had to offer. Downhills Don't Come Free takes you through the ups and downs (literal and figurative) of Holl's ride. By turns amusing and reflective, self-deprecating and self-assured, it chronicles every aspect of the journey, from the breathtaking vastness of the Alaskan-Canadian wilderness to the fortitude, generosity, and eccentricity of the people he met along the way.

    They love reading about their tests and tribulations and they love to ride them - a cricket lover can never bat at Lord's, or a football supporter score at Wembley, but any rider can take on the challenge of an iconic mountain.There have been fine books about the big climbs before but never from the voice of an elite GC winner, taking you inside what these climbs really feel like, where the attacks come, where the pain kicks in.From best-known big-hitters, via pro-peloton favourites, to the secret climbs Geraint has come to love, and featuring Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Mallorca and Wales, this is the cyclist's secret manual.

    Prepared to be awed and inspired by Chris Froome riding on at the Tour de France with a broken wrist or Geraint Thomas finishing it with a broken pelvis.In The Hardmen the writers behind cycling superblog Velominati.com and The Rules will tell the stories and illuminate the myths of not just the greatest cyclists ever, but the toughest. From Eddy Merckx to Beryl Burton, and from Marianne Vos to Edwig Van Hooydonk, the book will lay bare the secrets of their extraordinary and inspirational endurance in the face of pain, danger and disaster. After all, suffering is one of the joys of being a cyclist. Embrace climbs, relish the descents, and get ready to harden up. . .

    In 1980, Angie and her two siblings are dropped into a world of the poorest tenements during a decade where material wealth was worshipped. But these are not your usual run-of-the-mill Florida retirement occupants—these are tenants with issues that Angie soon realizes are the same that can happen anywhere—even under her own roof. Her place in society is further confused by the fact that she doesn’t live in a trailer but nonetheless, shares a postage-sized backyard with a less-desired community by societal standards and attends a prestigious private school more than 45 minutes from her cinderblock castle. After spending a decade living in a world of indiscernible differences, Angie’s family decides it’s time to pull up stakes, sell the trailer park and buy a double-wide trailer of their own in the Carnie Capital of World, Gibsonton, Florida. Funny at times, nostalgic throughout, Trailer Trash hits on some serious notes and undertones about societal differences and the trials of surviving childhood in any decade and any environment.

    As the daughter of a wealthy landowning family, Little Jade spends her early life in a large, luxurious compound in the Chinese countryside. Though she has everything she could ever want materially and a staff of servants waiting on her every need, Little Jade is unfulfilled. She has no memories of her mother and rarely sees her father. Her paternal grandmother has lovingly raised her since her parents left to study at university shortly after she was born. When Little Jade's father returns home to marry a much younger woman -- his first wife, Little Jade's mother, disappeared after the Japanese invasion-- the story then follows the turbulent path of the richly drawn characters as they navigate their own personal turmoil through the instability of living in China in the years before revolution. Lin effortlessly weaves together the painful histories of Little Jade's mother, grandmother, stepmother and father into the child's own ordeals, which include being shipped off to live in a convent on the eve of civil war and a plague that decimates an entire village. Though at times their actions are appalling -- particularly Little Jade's father's -- Lin paints the characters in such a way to elicit sympathy as they confront changing family traditions and the immense unrest sweeping the country; their reactions are convincingly authentic. Lin's deft, graceful prose builds ominous tension for the novel... Lin succeeds in creating both an absorbing historical chronicle and the moving story of a family's unbreakable bond." Kirkus Reviews

    This was no ordinary bike race. Unlike the Tour de France, which Guinness had made his name reporting on for decades, competitors rode completely unassisted from Fremantle in Western Australia to the Opera House in Sydney on the other side of the country - a gruelling distance of over 5000 kilometres that would not only test riders' physical endurance but their psychological resilience. Dubbed 'The Hunger Games on Wheels', there would be no help, just riders and their bikes crossing one of the most beautiful – and often most inhospitable – places on earth.   Rupert’s mission was to test his own grit, physical and emotional, as he followed the trail of the pioneering men and women whose historic rides over the last two centuries unveiled a largely unknown interior.     But when a terrible tragedy stopped everyone in their tracks, what he discovered was the extraordinary power of the human spirit. Rupert and his fellow competitors were forced to make some of the toughest decisions they had ever faced.

    As the story starts, Ashley is eight years old and living in Tehran in the 1960s: the Shah was in power, and life for Westerners was rich and privileged. But somehow it didn't all add up to a fairytale. There were bankruptcies and prisons, betrayals and lovers, lies and evasions—and throughout it all, Ashley's passionate and strong-willed mother, Genie. Stories of mothers and daughters are some of the most compelling in contemporary memoir, from The Liar's Club and The Glass Castle, to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Bad Blood. Farangi Girl deserves to be in their company. It's an honest and endlessly recognizable portrait of a mother by a daughter who loved her (and was loved in return). Against this extraordinary background, Ashley's journey into adulthood was more helter-skelter than most and this portrait of a bewitching and endlessly inventive mother is surprising and deeply moving.

    An instant classic, "Outside Passage" offers the spare, vivid account of enduring a hardscrabble childhood in the '30s and '40s at the edge of America.

    Written with a candid and amusing authority that comes from over 25 years of sports commentary with Eurosport, Carlton Kirby gives an insider's view of competitive cycling delivered in the inimitable, humorous, and at times outspoken style for which he has become globally famous.Peppered with hilarious anecdotes of life on the road with Tour legend Sean Kelly, Kirby indulges in some soap-box moments to lambast his various bugbears, from crazy spectators in mankinis and lazy Italian monks to the more serious issues of rider safety, team strategies and questionable ethics.With his mix of expert opinion and trademark wit, Carlton covers the funny, the serious, the heartbreaking, and the more bizarre moments of professional cycling.

    Born unwanted and raised without love, the child-author invents a rich inner life to see her through years of trauma. Leaving home at 16, the teen-author struggles to find happiness and a sense of place in a world that feels confusing and unfamiliar. Then, years after stumbling into an adulthood mired in tragedy and broken dreams, the woman-author finds herself at a crossroads. The choice she ultimately makes is as stunning as it is brave.Told in unflinching and often lyrical prose, Elephant Girl goes beyond a singular life story to speak of powerful, universal truths and the ability of the human spirit to redeem itself.From the soul of a broken child and the heart of a resilient woman comes a story about turning imagination into possibility and scars into art. - Rosie O'Donnell, Talk Show Host In a culture of bootstraps and bromides, it has become unfashionable to talk about the long-term effects of child abuse and being raised without love or nurture. Unlike psychologist Harry Harlowe's infamous experiments with monkeys and maternal deprivation - where all his subjects ended up abnormal or dead from what has been termed "emotional anorexia" -abused children are supposed to be more resilient. In fact, a significant number of people insist that child abuse isn't really that big of a deal and that such children will eventually enter into adulthood with the same knowledge and tools as those who were not abused, or at least be able to gain them quickly and easily. Less acknowledged is the fact that there can be long-term and even lifelong physical, social and emotional consequences of child abuse. Oftentimes, the one affected doesn't even realize what those consequences are until well into adulthood. High anxiety, hyper-vigilance, thwarted sexuality and brain damage that went undiagnosed until the age of 46 were just some of the after-effects experienced by the author of Elephant Girl: A Human Story. The story of Precious ends with her teenage years. Jeannette Walls concludes Glass Castles as a college student. In A Child Called It, Dave Pelzer is removed from his abusive home by age 12 and eventually finds a loving foster family. In contrast, Elephant Girl: A Human Story is about what happens when there is no clear path to follow, no outside guidance and no dramatic rescue-when the only life-saving graces are imagination, self-determination and, ultimately, an undefeatable sense of hope. This is not an easy story to read. Those who enjoy reading about miracles or quick solutions will surely be disappointed. Those looking to cast blame or buoy their belief that they could have done better will find plenty of ammunition. However, those who are willing to see beyond the convenience and labels of bootstraps and bromides - who believe that human experiences are diverse and complex - will find much to relate to in this rarely told story.