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This is No Ordinary Joy by Sarah Symons
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Living the Dream: in the Algarve, Portugal
Alyson Sheldrake - 2020
Follow them as they battle with the Portuguese language, set up their own businesses, adopt a rescue dog and navigate the 'expat' world.Part guidebook, mostly memoir; this book is for anyone who has ever wondered what moving abroad is really like; and is essential reading for anyone considering moving to Portugal.
A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree: Mad adventures on a Greek peninsula
Marjory McGinn - 2016
How did this happen? Easy, this is Greece and nothing ever goes to plan. The couple’s latest adventure in Koroni, on the Messinian peninsula, takes them on another perilous and funny journey, with house rental dramas, scorpion threats, a publishing upheaval, and much more. But when they are finally seduced by the charm of unspoilt Koroni, make new friends, grapple with Greek lessons, and reconnect with some of the memorable characters of their Mani days, they discover once more why they continue to be in love with this resilient country, despite its ongoing economic crisis. And there’s not even a sting in this tale. Well … almost! REVIEWS: "This book is rare within the travel writing genre. It cleverly combines a travel narrative with enlightened observations about Greece, while retaining a light and entertaining touch throughout.” – Peter Kerr, best-selling author of Snowball Oranges
Glitter and Glue
Kelly Corrigan - 2014
After college, armed with a backpack, her personal mission statement, and a wad of traveler’s checks, she took off for Australia to see things and do things and Become Interesting. But it didn’t turn out the way she pictured it. In a matter of months, her savings shot, she had a choice: get a job or go home. That’s how Kelly met John Tanner, a newly widowed father of two looking for a live-in nanny. They chatted for an hour, discussed timing and pay, and a week later, Kelly moved in. And there, in that house in a suburb north of Sydney, 10,000 miles from the house where she was raised, her mother’s voice was suddenly everywhere, nudging and advising, cautioning and directing, escorting her through a terrain as foreign as any she had ever trekked. Every day she spent with the Tanner kids was a day spent reconsidering her relationship with her mother, turning it over in her hands like a shell, straining to hear whatever messages might be trapped in its spiral. This is a book about the difference between travel and life experience, stepping out and stepping up, fathers and mothers. But mostly it’s about who you admire and why, and how that changes over time.
Drunk Chickens and Burnt Macaroni
Mary Smith - 2001
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.
Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs
Jay Farrar - 2013
Recollections of Farrar's father are prominent throughout the stories. Ultimately, it is music and musicians that are given the most space and the final word since music has been the creative impetus and driving force for the past 35 years of his life.In writing these stories, he found a natural inclination to focus on very specific experiences; a method analogous to the songwriting process. The highlights and pivotal experiences from that musical journey are all represented as the binding thread in these stories, illustrated throughout with photography from his life. If life is a movie, then these stories are the still frames.
Falling for London: A Cautionary Tale
Sean Mallen - 2018
Not unlike the plaster in his crappy, overpriced London flat. The veteran journalist was ecstatic when he unexpectedly got the chance he’dalways craved: to be a London-based foreign correspondent. It meant living in agreat city and covering great events, starting with the Royal Wedding of Williamand Kate. Except: his tearful wife and six-year-old daughter hated the idea ofuprooting their lives and moving to another country. Falling for London is the hilarious and touching story of how he convincedthem to go, how they learned to live in and love that wondrous but challengingcity, and how his dream came true in ways he could have never expected.
All My Dogs Go to Heaven
Kay Bratt - 2021
Kay Bratt explores these ideas in All (my) Dogs Go to Heaven. Touching on relevant Biblical scriptures, she chronicles her tumultuous past— including a traveling childhood and a near decade of domestic abuse— revealing how her beloved pets helped her cope, and instilled hope for better days ahead. Interspersed within this memoir are short essays from real people who have experienced signs from their departed pets as proof that they are still around in spirit. Included in the back of the book is a Grief Guide to help get us through those first devastating days after our loss.Insightful and fascinating, Kay Bratt has ultimately given us a message of hope with All (my) Dogs Go to Heaven. -Judy Morgan, Founder of Yorkie Rescue of the Carolinas
On the Nose: A Lifelong Obsession with Yosemite's Most Iconic Climb
Hans Florine - 2016
Ronnie
Ronnie Wood - 2007
For more than three decades since then, Ronnie, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts have formed the core of the greatest rock 'n' roll band in history. This book is Ronnie's autobiography, and like the band it can only be talked about in superlatives: it's simply one of the biggest, most outrageous, most extraordinary and most fun rock 'n' roll memoirs ever to be published.From early 1960s Britain, when acts like The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Who and The Rolling Stones crisscrossed the country's club scene in clapped-out vans, barely making ends meet but having the time of their lives, through to the global mega stadium concerts of the 21st century (in 2006 the Stones played live to more than two million people in Rio), Ronnie takes us on a journey through his life and through rock history. Filled with unforgettable characters and truly eye-popping stories, his autobiography reveals Ronnie the husband, father, grandfather, artist and rock star the way you have never seen any rock star before.
Ronnie
is an up-front and personal look at life as a Rolling Stone, from the inside, and at the Stones as the rest of the world has never seen them. After
Ronnie
, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll will never be the same again.
Fat Woman on the Mountain: How I Lost Half of Myself and Found Happiness
Kara Richardson Whitely - 2010
She lost 120 pounds and found happiness along the way. Kara Richardson Whitely has been a journalist for the past decade. She has been featured in Self, American Hiker and Redbook magazines.
Black Tar: For the Love of Heroin
Stephen E. Crockett - 2012
Please understand one critical feature of this book. It is a biography, hand written by the junkie in question about his life and his alone. As such it is not a piece of literary perfection. It has not been polished to perfection by a team of editors, nor was it published by a major publishing company. Black Tar: For The Love of Heroin was originally written on a legal pad as part of a twelve step program. It made its way to me, its ultimate editor, and I was amazed by the details Stephen was able to remember and capture on paper. Once I got to know him I asked him if he would work with me on his life story and he reluctantly agreed. Sensing his hesitancy I told him we would not use his name and focus on the day to day existence of a junkie as he experienced it living from fix to fix. But Stephen could be a hard person to track down and his never ending thirst for the needle made his story a hard one to tell. I spent days upon weeks crawling the downtown streets looking for him and a lot of times when I did find him I would have to buy him heroin just to get him to work with me. So, I made a deal with him, like making a deal with the devil, that if he would help me drag his biography into existence, I would buy him enough heroin to get through each and every day we worked together.One day's worth of heroin for one day's worth of storytelling. This made it easy for him to make himself available for the writing of his biography. By the time I met Stephen he was almost fifty years old and in full blown heroin psychosis. How he managed to live as long as he had was always a miracle to me. Over the course of a year and several months I pulled every story Stephen could remember from his heroin-addled brain and preserved them on paper. But I never wanted this story to be an autobiography. I wanted it to be Stephen telling his story, in his words, no matter how it might look like in the end.With these rules in place I gave him his first computer and at first he slaved over his 'hunt and peak' computer skills. But the more he wrote the more he remembered and slowly, after three long years of exchanging one day of heroin to entice him to work one day of writing, Stephen declared himself finished with the project. I read what he had written and quickly realized that active heroin junkies make terrible writers. What he had produced was basically unusable. To make a three-year writing stint something of literary value I set myself to editing what he had written. I didn't want to strip it of the style of writing that made it junkie. More than anything else I wanted to preserve his perspective, sense of pain, his defeat, his single-minded approach to heroin and to the fact he knew it was going to kill him. I think that fatalistic view of life is what hit me the hardest.To make the book easy to digest I divided it into five segments and then spread his life between the points. And that is what we ended up with. The biography of a drug addict; barely touched by an editor's pen, and filled with the dirt, muck and blood that is a junkies life.
Half-Safe: A Story of Love, Obsession, and History's Most Insane Around-the-world Adventure
Ben Carlin - 1991
The vehicle in question was an amphibious jeep developed by the U.S. Army, which Carlin christened Half-Safe, after a deodorant slogan. It was a mechanical mongrel that was supposed to move with equal ease across land and water but in practice wasn't much good for either one. Undaunted, Carlin and his wife Elinore set off across the Atlantic Ocean with dreams of fame and fortune, and of carving a small notch in history. What happened next is one of the most bizarre, remarkable, and forgotten adventure stories of the 20th century. In Half-Safe, author James Nestor endeavors to uncover Ben Carlin's fate and finds a gripping story of love, danger, and extraordinary perseverance that spans three oceans and five continents. Half-Safe takes us from the eye of an Atlantic Ocean hurricane to the sweltering Sahara to the impenetrable jungles of Southeast Asia—and into the mind of a man who could overcome everything but his own demons.
Behind Blue Curtains: A True Crime Memoir of an Amish Woman's Survival, Escape, and Pursuit of Justice
Lizzy Hershberger - 2021
So Close: Infertile and Addicted to Hope
Tertia Loebenberg Albertyn - 2009
and trying, and trying some more? How far do you go to achieve your dream of having children?So Close is the heart wrenching, exhilarating, devastatingly funny story of Tertia Albertyn's battle with infertility. Tertia wanted a baby so badly she went through nine IVFs. Most people give up after the third.I don't think I am being brave at all. I am just too terrified NOT to try again.In her worst nightmare she could never have imagined that making a baby would take her four years, each treatment bringing her and her husband Marko closer and closer to creating their family.During Tertia's journey everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Until, finally, everything goes just right.Tertia is as hilarious as she is irrepressible, as approachable as she is knowledgeable. If you are struggling with infertility, have triumphed over infertility or have felt empathy with someone who is going through this experience, you will find a friend in Tertia.
What have we got Toulouse: A family moving to France
Nikki McArthur - 2020
Nikki McArthur aka ‘A mother in France’ opens up a window to her world and invites you to journey with her through the positive and negative experiences of the process of moving, settling, making a living and raising a family in a new country. Woven within the pages of the family’s experiences are a treasury of facts and information making it not only a fascinating read but a useful guide to living in France.Uncovering the thought processes behind why the family decided to move to France and how they went about it, the book reveals how to prepare for a move abroad, house hunting tips and the buying process. Discover what it was like when they arrived, the main difficulties and challenges they faced with settling in as a family, renovation challenges and experiences of developing a business and making a living. Follow the ups and downs of family life in France from pregnancy and childbirth through to adulthood with fascinating details on education, health, cultural differences and raising bilingual children. An intriguing mixture of facts backed by true life experiences and comparisons and a compelling read for anyone interested in or considering moving abroad.