Once Bitten


Nick Marsh - 2016
    Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and Alan soon discovers he has far more enemies than he was expecting – aside from vicious pets, difficult owners, surly farmers, and children from hell, he finds himself working with an unhinged and jealous surgeon who makes it his personal mission ruin Alan's life. Battling long hours, life and death decisions, tragic cases, a complaint from the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and an unexpected love triangle, Alan’s hopes of saving the world are quickly replaced with a simple question: Can he even last a year in practice? Once Bitten… is the story of a young vet’s first few months in practice, and how they changed his life forever.

For the Love of Scott!


Jo Hamilton - 2011
    She taught her family how to read Scott’s medical chart and to ask pointed questions, no longer leaving his care to the medical professionals who had overdosed him with drugs to the very brink of death in less than three days.“Jo, you have to tell people what they’ve done to me. You have to tell them!”pleaded her little brother, as he lay writhing in agony.In “For the Love of Scott!”, the author recollects her family’s poignant story of love, bewilderment, and lingering frustration when faced with catastrophic medical mistakes. Read the experiences of Scott Hamilton’s family members as they struggle through a storm of horrific medical errors that could have been prevented and recognize what you need to do when someone you love is faced with life-threatening circumstances created by health experts.It took Jo 27 years to put this heartbreaking event down on paper. Writing opened old wounds and required hours of research and documentation. It forced her family to relive a chapter in their own lives that they desperately wanted closed. Yet, they rallied together to help Jo with her mission to keep that promise.To help further her goals, Jo Hamilton will be donating a portion of the proceeds from the sale of her book, to the 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Winner, Scott Hamilton's foundation, The Scott Hamilton CARES Initiative. The Scott Hamilton CARES Initiative was created to help with cancer research, support cancer patients and their families, and find a cure cancer.

Loudmouth: Tales (and Fantasies) of Sports, Sex, and Salvation from Behind the Microphone


Craig Carton - 2013
    The station manager who hired him was the first to recognize his considerable on-air talent, and helped start what has become a legendary radio career. Often compared to Howard Stern, Carton has hosted a series of highly rated shows, and in 2007 he joined WFAN, where he and Boomer Esiason host an eponymous show every morning for four hours out of a studio in New York City.In this debut book, Carton invites the reader to join him as he recounts tales from his suburban youth, defends his long-held love affair with the New York Jets, reminisces about the shenanigans of some of the highest paid and most celebrated athletes playing today, and reflects on his work as one of radio’s craftiest, most hilarious personalities ever to get behind the microphone.

Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport


Hannah Palmer - 2017
    Having uprooted herself from a promising career in publishing in her adopted Brooklyn, Palmer embarks on a quest to determine the fate of her lost homes—and of a community that has been erased by unchecked Southern progress. Palmer's journey takes her from the ruins of kudzu-covered, airport-owned ghost towns to carefully preserved cemeteries wedged between the runways; into awkward confrontations with airport planners, developers, and even her own parents. Along the way, Palmer becomes an amateur detective, an urban historian, and a mother. Lyrically chronicling the overlooked devastation and beauty along the airport’s fringe communities in the tradition of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Leslie Jamison, Palmer unearths the startling narratives about race, power, and place that continue to shape American cities. Part memoir, part urban history, Flight Path: A Search for My Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport is a riveting account of one young mother's attempt at making a home where there’s little home left.

TRAPPED


Lori L. Stephens - 2009
    Stephens was thrown out into the streets by her mother. This would be the beginning of a life no one deserves to endure, ever.With nowhere to go, confused and frightened beyond comprehension, she settled in inside of a small washroom of a condo complex. Curled up as small as she could make herself, she lay abandoned. What happen next can only be adequately described in the pages within…, and this was only the beginning.Through her struggle to stay alive in a world she barely understood, with non-existent parents from a broken home, this young girl met adversity headlong, with no recourse at her disposal.In the memoirs of the next 30 years of her life of drug and alcohol abuse, with METHAMPHETAMINES as her mainstay, you will learn how she was forced to resort to physical violence to stay alive. Stabbing one of her rapists was only the beginning. Domestic violence, conflict with the Law, jail, how she escaped with the courage, the will to stay alive, and the guts to persevere through an impossible road out of the toughest trap from which one might ever have to escape, Lori L. Stephens overcomes impossible adversity. And in result, this woman’s strength to overcome—and her heroism to help others do the same, through 6 years in recovery, and living a life she never dreamed possible, are all described profoundly in this book, and can only inspire and encourage every person in their daily lives.

Uncharted: A Couple's Epic Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing from One Life to Another


Kim Brown Seely - 2019
    This is an adventure story about a voyage from one life chapter to another that involves a too-big sailboat, a narrow and unknown sea, and an appetite to witness a mythical blonde bear that inhabits a remote rainforest.Kim Brown Seely and her husband had been damn good parents for more than 20 years. That was coming to an end as their youngest son was about to move across the country. The economy was in freefall and their jobs stagnant, so they impulsively decided to buy a big broken sailboat, learn how to sail it, and head up through the Salish Sea and the Inside Passage to an expanse of untamed wilderness in search of the elusive blonde Kermode bear that only lives in a secluded Northwest forest. Theirs was a voyage of discovery into who they were as individuals and as a couple at an axial moment in their lives. Wise and lyrical, this heartfelt memoir unfolds amid the stunningly wild archipelago on the far edge of the continent.

Better Late Than Never: From Barrow Boy to Ballroom


Len Goodman - 2009
    Len Goodman tells all about his new-found fame, his experiences on Strictly Come Dancing, and also on the no.1 US show Dancing with the Stars and his encounters with the likes of Heather Mills-McCartney and John Sergeant. But the real story is in his East End roots. And Len's early life couldn't be more East End. The son of a Bethnal Green costermonger he spent his formative years running the fruit and veg barrow and being bathed at night in the same water Nan used to cook the beetroot. There are echoes of Billy Elliot too. Though Len was a welder in the London Docks, he dreamt of being a professional footballer, and came close to making the grade had he not broken his foot on Hackney Marshes. The doctor recommended ballroom dancing as a light aid to his recovery. And Len, it turned out, was a natural. At first his family and work mates mocked, but soon he had made the final of a national competition and the welders descended en masse to the Albert Hall to cheer him on. With his dance partner, and then wife Cheryl, Len won the British Championships in his late twenties and ballroom dancing became his life. Funny and heart-warming, Len Goodman's autobiography has all the honest East End charm of Tommy Steele, Mike Read or Roberta Taylor.

Fierce: A Memoir


Barbara Robinette Moss - 2004
     Barbara Robinette Moss grew up in the red clay hills of Alabama, the fourth of eight children, in a childhood defined by close sibling alliances, staggering poverty, and uncommon abuse at the hands of her wild-eyed, charismatic, alcoholic father. In Fierce, Moss looks at what happens when a child of such a family grows up. At once poetic and plainspoken, Moss, a "powerful writer" (Chicago Tribune), paints a vivid, moving portrait of her persistent quest to reinvent her life and rebel against the rural indigence, addiction, and broken dreams she inherited from her parents. With warmth, insight, and candor, Moss tells the poignant story of finally leaving everything she knew in Alabama to fulfill her ambition to become an artist. It is an odyssey filled with gritty improvisation (bringing her son, Jason, to her night job to sleep on the floor), bittersweet pragmatism (filling her purse on a dinner date with shrimp, rolls, and even a doily, to bring home to a waiting eight-year-old), and staunch conviction and pride (chasing a mail carrier down the street to defend her use of food stamps). As with many other children of alcoholics, the legacy of her father's alcoholism catches up with Moss, and an abusive relationship -- an inheritance and addiction of its own sort -- threatens to destroy all that she has accomplished. But as Moss learns to cope with her anger and pain, parenthood helps her discover true strength. Ultimately, Fierce is a warm, honest, and triumphant story, from a writer celebrated for her Southern lyricism, about a woman determined to make it on her own -- to shrug off the handicaps of her childhood and raise her son responsibly and well.

This Book is About Travel


Andrew Hyde - 2012
    If you have already been out in the big world and you enjoy the considerate observations that often come from travel, this book is for you. If you just can't get away, but hearing about someone else's adventures can take you there, this book is for you." -Lindsay LaShell2 years on the road. 1 backpack. 15 countries. Banned from one. Stories about Nepal, Colombia, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, Kenya, Qatar, UAE, Panama and more. This book is about the days, people, stories, ethics and philosophy that bridged the trip. What is modern travel? Why are you not on the road?

The Red Devil : A Memoir About Beating The Odds


Katherine Russell Rich - 1999
    Hailed by critics nationwide and winner of two 1999 Books for a Better Life Awards, this book shares the author's bold tale of illness, joy, mortality, and the improbable triumph of love in the midst of despair.

This Water Goes North


Dennis Weidemann - 2008
    With leaky tents, little experience, and no TV cameras or big-time sponsors, the lads set out in 1979 to paddle 1,400 miles north to Hudson Bay. Why? Why not! Driven by a youthful sense of adventure, they took the chance of a lifetime just to see what lay around the next turn. Sit in their canoe as they glide through smooth waters and survive rushing rivers. Experience with them the desolation of true wilderness and go on humorous escapades with local characters. With graceful storytelling, Dennis Weidemann weaves this richly diverse tale of near disasters, splendid sunsets, bootleggers, Mounties, polar bears, and the indomitable spirit of youth. Share the dream that still lives, and that will surely inspire others.

A Play On Words


Deric Longden - 1999
    The theme is the experience of Longden watching LOST FOR WORDS become a TV drama along with a collection of observations of life at home and abroad.

Confessions of A Bi-Polar Mardi Gras Queen


Marie Étienne - 2008
    "Confessions of a Bi-Polar Mardi Gras Queen" is the Marie's second memoir, dropping true stories of her life that read like fiction and give the reader much empathy with Marie's bipolar condition. She also hopes to inspire others with her will as a mother and woman of the world, and "Confessions of a Bi-Polar Mardi Gras Queen" is a fine execution of that goal." Marie Etienne, author of STORKBITES: A Memoir, returns with a collection of outrageous true stories that are fast-paced, heartfelt, and brutally honest.CONFESSIONS OF A BI-POLAR MARDI GRAS QUEEN is filled with thematically connected stories that swing between hilarity and devastation. One of nine children growing up in a well-to-do family in Southern Louisiana, Marie Etienne spent decades risking everything in her search for happiness, sanity, and love. As an adult, her increasingly erratic behavior mirrored the drama of her upbringing and took its toll on her two sons. At 43, recently diagnosed as bi-polar and on the brink of suicide, her last-ditch hope was to come to terms with her deep-rooted feelings of fear, shame, and resentment by facing head-on who she really was, who she wanted to be, and what she was willing to do to make her life worth living. Etienne explores the themes of love versus lust, the legacy of abuse and mental illness, the impact of murder and suicide among her siblings, and the redemptive powers of faith, forgiveness, and courage. Marie Etienne has written a book that reveals the unstoppable drive of a woman determined to forge her own path through the world. Praise for Confessions of a Bi-Polar Mardi Gras Queen: "Marie Etienne has not lived an ordinary life, as the title of her second memoir suggests. Born into a wealthy family, she endured the untimely deaths of her alcoholic parents, the murder and suicide of two brothers, her own severe depression and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Nevertheless, Etienne has come back from the abyss and is anxious to help others through her inspirational stories of survival." -- Karen Jones of Publishers Weekly Show Daily, May 2008 "Not everyone can pull of a Trifecta of overcoming promiscuity, alcohol abuse, and towering rage as consequences of an abusive Louisiana childhood. In her second book, Marie Etienne shares her trials and victories with humor, compassion, and insight. Etienne's candor always leaves me breathless with both envy and amazement, and her writing skills make for an enjoyable and revelatory read." -- Peggy Vincent, Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife "Marie Etienne has written a brutally frank and captivating memoir that will have readers rooting for her at each step along the way in her quest to attain balance and confidence in her life and overcome years of dysfunction and insecurity." -- Wendy Nelson Tokunaga, Love In Translation

The Sum of My Parts


James Sanford - 2011
    At first I tried to deny my condition (trying to treat a tumor with hot baths and ice packs). Eventually, I decided I would learn as much about my illness as possible while trying to keep my emotions on hold.What followed was an experience that finally forced me to deal with issues about my body that I had tried to ignore for decades. Along the way I dealt with a physician who gave me ridiculous advice and acquaintances who asked unbelievable questions. But I was also fortunate to be surrounded by people who supported me and doctors who helped me through the process.

The Complete Blood, Sweat and Tea


Tom Reynolds - 2011
    He could help to deliver a baby in the morning and witness the last moments of a dying man in the afternoon. He deals with road accidents, knife attacks, domestic violence, drug overdoses, neglect and suffering.And you think you’re having a bad day at work?His experiences spawned two volumes of memoir, both of which are collected here.