Island on the Edge: A Life on Soay


Anne Cholawo - 2016
    She had never heard of Soay before, let alone visited it, but something inexplicable drew her there. Within ten minutes of stepping off the said fishing boat, she had fallen under the spell of the island, and after a few months she moved there to live. She is still there. When she arrived on the remote west coast island there were only 17 inhabitants, among them the legendary Hebridean sharker Tex Geddes and his family. Today, including Anne and her husband Robert, there are only three. This book describes her extraordinary transition from a hectic urban lifestyle to one of rural isolation and self-sufficiency, without mains electricity, medical services, shops or any of the other modern amenities we take for granted. Anne describes the history of Soay and its unique wildlife, and as well as telling her own personal story introduces along the way some of the off-beat and colourful characters associated with the island, notably Tex's one-time associate, the celebrated writer and naturalist, Gavin Maxwell.

In the Skin of a Jihadist: Inside Islamic State's Recruitment Networks


Anna Erelle - 2015
    In 48 hours he has ‘fallen in love’ with her, calls her day and night, urges her to marry him, join him in Syria to enjoy a life of paradise – and join his jihad.Discover how ISIS entraps people such as the teenage girls from Bethnal GreenAnna Erelle is the undercover journalist behind "Melodie". Created to investigate the powerful propaganda weapons of Islamic State, “Melodie” is soon sucked in by Bilel, right-hand man of the infamous Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. An Iraqi for whose capture the US government has promised $10 million, al-Baghdadi is described by Time Magazine as the most dangerous man in the world and by himself as the caliph of Islamic State. Bilel shows off his jeep, his guns, his expensive watch. He boasts about the people he has just killed.With Bilel impatient for his future wife, “Melodie” embarks on her highly dangerous mission, which – at its ultimate stage – will go very wrong … Enticed into this lethal online world like hundreds of other young people, including many young British girls and boys, Erelle’s harrowing and gripping investigation helps us to understand the true face of terrorism.

Faith Among Shadows


Malcolm Leal - 2009
    While on special assignment with the Cuban Special Forces, Malcolm receives a blow from a sniper rifle that almost ends his life. It is in this moment of darkness that Malcolm calls upon this God in faith, thus beginning his miraculous journey in search of truth, and his eventual discovery of and conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Places in Between


Rory Stewart - 2004
    By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters--by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny--Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

The Terrorist's Son: A Story of Choice


Zak Ebrahim - 2014
    While in prison, Nosair helped plan the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In one of his infamous video messages, Osama bin Laden urged the world to “Remember El-Sayyid Nosair.”For Zak Ebrahim, a childhood amongst terrorism was all he knew. After his father’s incarceration, his family moved often, and as the perpetual new kid in class, he faced constant teasing and exclusion. Yet, though his radicalized father and uncles modeled fanatical beliefs, to Ebrahim something never felt right. To the shy, awkward boy, something about the hateful feelings just felt unnatural.In this book, Ebrahim dispels the myth that terrorism is a foregone conclusion for people trained to hate. Based on his own remarkable journey, he shows that hate is always a choice—but so is tolerance. Though Ebrahim was subjected to a violent, intolerant ideology throughout his childhood, he did not become radicalized. Ebrahim argues that people conditioned to be terrorists are actually well positioned to combat terrorism, because of their ability to bring seemingly incompatible ideologies together in conversation and advocate in the fight for peace. Ebrahim argues that everyone, regardless of their upbringing or circumstances, can learn to tap into their inherent empathy and embrace tolerance over hatred. His original, urgent message is fresh, groundbreaking, and essential to the current discussion about terrorism.

Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics


Charles Krauthammer - 2013
      A brilliant stylist known for an uncompromising honesty that challenges conventional wisdom at every turn, Krauthammer has for decades daz­zled readers with his keen insight into politics and government. His weekly column is a must-read in Washington and across the country. Now, finally, the best of Krauthammer’s intelligence, erudition and wit are collected in one volume.   Readers will find here not only the country’s leading conservative thinker offering a pas­sionate defense of limited government, but also a highly independent mind whose views—on feminism, evolution and the death penalty, for example—defy ideological convention. Things That Matter also features several of Krautham­mer’s major path-breaking essays—on bioeth­ics, on Jewish destiny and on America’s role as the world’s superpower—that have pro­foundly influenced the nation’s thoughts and policies. And finally, the collection presents a trove of always penetrating, often bemused re­flections on everything from border collies to Halley’s Comet, from Woody Allen to Win­ston Churchill, from the punishing pleasures of speed chess to the elegance of the perfectly thrown outfield assist.   With a special, highly autobiographical in­troduction in which Krauthammer reflects on the events that shaped his career and political philosophy, this indispensible chronicle takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the fashions and follies, the tragedies and triumphs, of the last three decades of American life.

Greedy Bastards: One City’s Texas-Size Struggle to Avoid a Financial Crisis


Sheryl Sculley - 2020
    City infrastructure was crumbling, strong financial policies and systems were nonexistent, many executive positions were vacant, public satisfaction was low, ethical standards were weak, and public safety union salaries and benefits were outpacing revenues, crowding out other essential city services. Simply put: San Antonio was on the verge of collapse.Greedy Bastards tells the story of Sheryl and her new team's uphill battle to turn around San Antonio city government. She takes you behind closed doors to share the hard changes she made and the strategies she used to create mutually beneficial solutions to the city's biggest problems.Many of the issues Sheryl found in San Antonio are present in cities across the US. Packed with wins and losses, lessons learned, and pitfalls encountered, Greedy Bastards is a guidebook for any city official tasked with turning around a struggling city.

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership


James Comey - 2018
    His journey provides an unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in what makes an effective leader.Mr. Comey served as Director of the FBI from 2013 to 2017, appointed to the post by President Barack Obama. He previously served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. deputy attorney general in the administration of President George W. Bush. From prosecuting the Mafia and Martha Stewart to helping change the Bush administration's policies on torture and electronic surveillance, overseeing the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation as well as ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Comey has been involved in some of the most consequential cases and policies of recent history.

Just a Few Bumps


Emily L. Nash - 2020
    Tackling the job with skills picked up along the way and enough Redbull to sink a battleship. The stories are real. The patients are real, and the emotions are real. Things I would tell my former student-self: You are going to laugh. You are going to cry. You are going to be scared. You are going to want to quit. You will have PTSD. You are going to see death. But hold on, you got this. It's just a few bumps.

Letter To Daniel Tie In: Despatches From The Heart


Fergal Keane - 1997
    His latest work for Radio 4 was Letter to Daniel, an emotional message to his newborn son.

Living My Life, Vol. 2


Emma Goldman - 1931
    I would tear your heart out and feed it to my dog.” This was one of the less obscene messages received by Emma Goldman (1869-1940), while in jail on suspicion of complicity in the assassination of McKinley. The most notorious woman of her day, she was bitterly hated by millions and equally revered by millions.The strong feelings she aroused are understandable. She was an alien, a practicing anarchist, a labor agitator, a pacifist in World War 1, an advocate of political violence, a feminist, a proponent of free love and birth control, a communist, a street-fighter for justice — all of which she did with strong intellect and boundless passion. Today, of course, many of the issues that she fought over are just as vital as they were then.Emma Goldman came from Russia at the age of 17. After an encounter with the sweatshop and an unfortunate marriage, she plunged into the bewildering intellectual and activist chaos that attended American social evolution around the turn of the twentieth century. She knew practically everyone of importance in radical circles. She dominated many areas of the radical movement, lecturing, writing, haranguing, and publishing to awaken the world to her ideas. After World War I she was deported to Russia, where she soon discovered that anarchists were no better liked than in America, despite Lenin’s first gesture of welcome. She escaped with her life but never was allowed to return to the United States.Emma Goldman was a devastatingly honest woman, who spared herself as little as she spared anyone else. From her account the reader can gain insight into a curious personality type of recurrent interest: a woman who devoted her life to eliminating suffering, yet could make a bomb or assist in staging an assassination. Equally interesting are her comments on other radicals of the period, such as Kropotkin, Berkman, Mooney, Lenin, Trotsky, Haywood, Most, the Haymarket martyrs, and many others. Her autobiography, written with vigor, ranks among the finest in the English language.

Trust: America's Best Chance


Pete Buttigieg - 2020
    In a century shaped by terrorism, financial collapse, Trumpist populism, global pandemic, and systemic racism, trust—in our government, corporations, experts, and, most tragically, in one another—has precipitously eroded and, for so many, never existed in the first place. Recognizing that we are now experiencing disastrous consequences, the former South Bend mayor offers a direct reckoning with the corruption of social responsibility, interweaving history, political philosophy, and affecting passages of memoir, offering a new outlook for how we can confront the next decade’s challenges by building accountability. In this urgent work, Buttigieg confirms his status as a visionary political thinker.

Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy


James O'Keefe - 2013
    He and his associates have famously infiltrated some of America’s most protected organizations and institutions. Now, in Breakthrough, O’Keefe chronicles the harrowing undercover investigation that opened America’s eyes to the chicanery of its state houses and the duplicity of the White House during one of the most compromised election campaigns in our nation’s history: the 2012 presidential race. Of all his controversial sting operations, this was the one that his late mentor, Andrew Breitbart, called “his most consequential.” While still on federal probation, O’Keefe organized an army of citizen journalists, planned a series of video stings to reveal the American system’s vulnerability to voter fraud, and went nose to nose with the most powerful political machine in the world. Along the way, O’Keefe found disheartening evidence that Americans are not nearly as free as we may believe, but also showed just how much real change ordinary citizens can bring about when they are willing to risk the wrath of the powerful. Free of ideology, Breakthrough is at its core a clarion call for a more ethical society. Despite being vilified and libeled by an establishment media dedicated to suppressing the truth, James O’Keefe has dared to break through the firewall and reshape public opinion by showing things as they really are.

Have Glove, Will Travel: Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond


Bill Lee - 2005
    His reputation for antics both on and off the field guaranteed that no other club would pick him up. The Ace from Space had landed on professional baseball’s blacklist, and so it was that one of the most popular major-league pitchers of our day was fated to pack his bags and wander the globe searching for a ball game. Have Glove, Will Travel is the chronicle of an amazing odyssey that began more than twenty years ago and continues today. Unable to live without baseball, Lee went anywhere he could find a game, beginning in the dank and dreary locker room of a Canadian hockey team that later became a softball team. We follow him around the world as he competes in pickup games, town tournaments, senior leagues, and fantasy camps, barnstorming like a modern Satchel Paige around the United States, South America, China, Cuba, Russia, and every province in Canada.At the heart of this story are the rollicking, colorful characters Lee meets during his travels, and the mishaps that befall him whether he’s sober or stoned. There’s the eccentric Latin pitching master Lee plays with in Cuba, who once struck out Ernest Hemingway. And a hilarious story that takes place in the backwoods of a British Columbia timber town, where Lee and Hall-of-Famer Ferguson Jenkins go fishing and end up being chased back to their pickup truck by a 450-pound black bear.Have Glove, Will Travel is so much more than the average baseball book. Lee’s humor, keen eye for detail, and extraordinary pitching intellect are always on display, but in the end this book is a love story about a middle-aged maverick who refused to stop pursuing his passion for a boy’s game long after the grown-ups told him he couldn’t play on their team anymore. Readers who loved Lee’s bestselling The Wrong Stuff, also written with Richard Lally, will find the long wait for this rich and wonderful sequel well worth it. Those who haven’t yet encountered the literary Bill Lee have a great treat in store.From the Hardcover edition.

O, Democracy!


Kathleen Rooney - 2014
    Colleen Dugan works for the other one—not on Capitol Hill, but in a Chicago skyscraper that overlooks Lake Michigan, among coworkers with little to do but field calls from angry constituents while the future of the nation gets decided elsewhere. In the coming weeks, Colleen will navigate the perils of costumed protestors, thuggish union reps, vacuous interns, trifling bureaucrats, dirty tricks by the senator’s Republican rival, and the unexpected discovery of a scandalous secret that will give her the power to change the course of the election and shape her own fate—though not necessarily for the better. A quarter-life crisis viewed from the ghostly perspective of the Founding Fathers, this is a hilarious and heartbreaking story about American politics and the difficult business of being a good citizen: walking the tricky line between self-sacrifice and self-sabotage, between doing your part and knowing your place.