National bestseller "Medicine Men" follows the beloved #1 bestselling "Heart in the Right Place". This is a collection of the most memorable moments from more than a dozen rural physicians who each practiced medicine for more than 50 years in the Southern Appalachian Mountains from 1930-2012. Hilarious, heroic, true stories of miracle cures, ghost dogs, and much madcap medical mayhem. Unimaginably funny and touching situations where men with nerves of steel and hearts of gold get stuck between a rock and a hard place in the Smoky Mountains. These men are saints who walk among us and Jourdan's father is one of them. Jourdan's work is often compared to James Herriot and Bill Bryson. This story collection is like "All Creatures Great and Small" but with people instead of animals or vingnettes from country doctors who took "A Walk in the Woods".Jourdan's first book is on hundreds of lists of best books of the year, best book club books, and funniest books. "Heart in the Right Place" was chosen as Family Circle magazine's first ever Book of the Month, won the Elle magazine Reader's Prize, named a Wall Street Journal Nonfiction Bestseller and ranked #1 on Amazon in Biography, Memoir, Science, and Medicine.

    An unlikely romance and novel wedding were soon followed by the birth of six children. They included Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, the most gifted literary siblings the world has ever known.Her children inherited her intelligence and wit and wrote masterpieces such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Yet Maria has remained an enigma while the fame of her family spread across the world. It is time to bring her out of the shadows, along with her overlooked contribution to the Brontë genius.Untimely death stalked Maria as it was to stalk all her children. But first there was her fascinating life's story, told here for the first time by Sharon Wright.

    Mary Anne Schwalbe is waiting for her chemotherapy treatments when Will casually asks her what she's reading. The conversation they have grows into tradition: soon they are reading the same books so they can have something to talk about in the hospital waiting room. The ones they choose range from classic to popular, from fantastic to spiritual, and we hear their passion for reading and their love for each other in their intimate and searching discussions. A profoundly moving testament to the power of love between a child and parent, and the power of reading in our lives.

    It reveals not only the true story but how the legend evolved, taking advantage of hundreds of primary sources that have never been examined before, including legal documents, letters, articles, and records that have been buried in archives for more than a century. Although Holmes is just as famous now as he was in 1895, this deep analysis of contemporary materials makes clear how much of the previously known story came from reporters who were nowhere near the action, a dangerously unqualified new police chief, and lies invented by Holmes himself.

    A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow’s Story is a literary memoir on a par with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice.

    They bring alive her family and friends, her surroundings and contemporary events with a freshness unparalleled in modern biographies. Above all we recognize the unmistakable voice of the author of such novels as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. We see the shift in her writing from witty and amusing descriptions of the social life of town and country, to a thoughtful and constructive tone while writing about the business of literary composition. R.W. Chapman's ground-breaking edition of the collected Letters first appeared in 1932, and a second edition followed twenty years later. Now in this third edition of Jane Austen's Letters, Deirdre Le Faye has added new material that has come to light since 1952, and re-ordered the letters into their correct chronological sequence. She has provided discreet and full annotation to each letter, including its provenance, and information on the watermarks, postmarks, and other physical details of the manuscripts, together with new biographical, topographical, and general indexes. Teachers, students, and fans of Jane Austen, at all levels, will find remarkable insight into one of the most popular novelists ever.

    Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city. It was a journey that would rob her of her innocence, her youth -- and ultimately her life. Read her diary. Enter her world. You will never forget her.

    Actually, more like half her weight. At the time, Jennette weighed 372 pounds.Jennette was not born fat. But, by fifth grade, her response to a school questionnaire asking what would you change about your appearance "was I would be thinner.” Sound familiar?Half-Assed is the captivating and incredibly honest story of Jennette’s journey to get in shape, lose weight, and change her life. From the beginning—dusting off her never-used treadmill and steering clear of the donut shop—to the end with her goal weight in sight, Jennette wows readers with her determined persistence to shed pounds and the ability to maintain her ever-present sense of self.

    Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak—whose novel-in-progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet—he persecuted Boris’s mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris’s affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga’s role in Boris’s writing process. Twice Olga was sentenced to work in Siberian labor camps, where she was interrogated about the book Boris was writing, but she refused to betray the man she loved. When Olga was released from the gulags, she assumed that Boris would leave his wife for her but, trapped by his family’s expectations and his own weak will, he never did. Drawing on previously neglected family sources and original interviews, Anna Pasternak explores this hidden act of moral compromise by her great-uncle, and restores to history the passionate affair that inspired and animated Doctor Zhivago. Devastated that Olga suffered on his behalf and frustrated that he could not match her loyalty to him, Boris instead channeled his thwarted passion for Olga into the love story in Doctor Zhivago. Filled with the rich detail of Boris’s secret life, Lara unearths a moving love story of courage, loyalty, suffering, drama, and loss, and casts a new light on the legacy of Doctor Zhivago.

    During the following ten years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. Life with Picasso, her account of those extraordinary years, is filled with intimate and astonishing revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts and his friends - Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti, among others. Francois Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her turbulent life with the temperamental (and even abusive) genius that was Picasso. As one of the few intimate witnesses to Picasso as a human being and as an artist, her account of him is invaluable for assessing him on both counts.

    Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an ‘awkward mixture of fact and fiction’, generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and color. Evident too in its brilliant account of a young person’s emerging awareness of the world and of his place within it are many of the stances, techniques and themes that would come to full flower in the immortal War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and in the other great works of Tolstoy’s maturity.

    Its exciting account of air adventure, combined with lyrical prose and the spirit of a philosopher, makes it one of the most popular works ever written about flying. Translated by Lewis Galantière.

    The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.

    Spurgeon, the beloved preacher and writer, few are familiar with the life and legacy of his wife, Susie.  Yet Susannah Spurgeon was an accomplished and devout woman of God who had a tremendous ministry in her own right, as well as in support of her husband. Even while dealing with serious health issues, she administered a book fund for poor pastors, edited and published her husband’s sermons and other writings, led a pastor’s aid ministry, wrote five books, made her home a hub of hospitality, and was instrumental in planting a church. And as her own writing attests, she was also a warm, charming, and fascinating woman.Now, for the first time, Susie brings this vibrant woman’s story to modern readers. Ray Rhodes Jr. examines Susannah’s life, showing that she was not only the wife of London’s most famous preacher, but also a woman who gave all she had in grateful service to the Lord.Susie is an inspiring and encouraging account of a truly remarkable woman of faith that will delight Spurgeon devotees and fans of Christian biographies alike.“I am writing in my husband’s study, where he thought, and prayed, and wrote. Every inch of the place is sacred ground. Everything remains precisely as he left it. His books (now my most precious possessions), stand in shining rows upon the shelves, in exactly the order in which he placed them, and one might almost fancy the room was ready and waiting for its master. But oh! That empty chair! That great portrait over the door! The strange, solemn silence, which pervades the place now that he is no longer on earth! I kneel sometimes by his chair, and laying my head on the cushioned arms, which so long supported his dear form, I pour out my grief before the Lord, and tell Him again that though I am left alone, yet I know that ‘He hath done all things well’…”

    Thoreau lived alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. It is one of the most influential and compelling books in American literature. This new paperback edition-introduced by noted American writer John Updike-celebrates the 150th anniversary of this classic work. Much of Walden's material is derived from Thoreau's journals and contains such engaging pieces as "Reading" and "The Pond in the Winter" Other famous sections involve Thoreau's visits with a Canadian woodcutter and with an Irish family, a trip to Concord, and a description of his bean field. This is the complete and authoritative text of Walden-as close to Thoreau's original intention as all available evidence allows. For the student and for the general reader, this is the ideal presentation of Thoreau's great document of social criticism and dissent.