You will enjoy every page of this heartwarming journey through the lives of the very precocious Sasha; the devoted, but not too smart Miniature Pinscher/Chihuahua mix, Squirt; the enduring pack-leader and CJ's husband, Mel; and CJ, the woman who loves them all with every fiber of her being.  All animal lovers understand that each pet that comes into our lives is special but that sometimes you are blessed with an extraordinary animal.  For CJ that was Sasha.  This memoir is about a cycle of life involving family, friends, paralysis, other pets, aging and loss. When faced with the possibility of euthanizing a 4-year-old Sasha, a desperate CJ turns to holistic veterinary medicine and acupuncture to save her Extraordinary Dachshund and learns how to use this "alternative medicine" to complement traditional veterinary medicine. Be prepared to laugh out loud, wonder and learn something new.  ENJOY!!

    Naturalist Susan Shetterly looks at how animals, humans, and plants share the land observing her own neighborhood in rural Maine. She tells tales of the locals (humans, yes, but also snowshoe hares, raccoons, bobcats, turtles, salmon, ravens, hummingbirds, cormorants, sandpipers, and spring peepers). She expertly shows us how they all make their way in an ever-changing habitat. In writing about a displaced garter snake, witnessing the paving of a beloved dirt road, trapping a cricket with her young son, rescuing a fledgling raven, or the town's joy at the return of the alewife migration, Shetterly issues warnings even as she pays tribute to the resilience that abounds. Like the works of Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold, Settled in the Wild takes a magnifying glass to the wildness that surrounds us. With keen perception and wit, Shetterly offers us an education in nature, one that should inspire us to preserve it.

    I am an only child, and she is a single parent. My mother is a trash hoarder. Ever since I can remember the house was always messy and stunk. At around age 9ish I noticed that something was wrong. I started throwing bags of trash away every day, just to have my mom freak out when she got home. We didn’t eat at home anymore because the fridge was disgusting, and she used the sink as a trash can, so it got clogged. We always ate out, we never had a home-cooked meal, and I’ve never had a family dinner at a dinner table. I had a stool in the corner of the living room. That is what I sat on, and that alone. I kept that corner as clean as I could. Made sure there was foot space, and that there wasn’t dust on the walls. That was my corner, my space. It never seemed to matter though, eventually that spot would get overrun with trash too...’Trash is Britney Fuller's shocking account of growing up in the house of a hoarder.

    But there is more to Chloe than viewers see on the TV, and the drama doesn’t stop when the camera stops rolling. Just two years ago, Chloe was a single mother struggling to make ends meet doing a string of jobs she hated and wondering if she would ever find happiness. Since joining the cast of The Only Way Is Essex, her life is now a whirlwind of glitzy parties and jet-set holidays, but life hasn’t always dealt Chloe a good hand. Her story is one of triumph over adversity, with plenty of laughs along the way. From her turbulent childhood where she was raised by a neighbor after her mother abandoned her, to battling with bullies and struggling with an eating disorder, to the magical moment when she met the man of her dreams.

    Volumes have been written about them, past and present. Understandably, most of these revolve around the skill, cunning and bravery that characterizes this distinctive band of brothers, but there are other dimensions to those who take to the skies to do battle that have not been given the emphasis they deserve - until now.You do not have to be an aviation aficionado to enjoy Colonel Steve Ladd's fascinating personal tale, woven around his 28-year career as a fighter pilot. This extremely engaging account follows a young man from basic pilot training to senior command through the narratives that define a unique ethos. From the United States to Southeast Asia; Europe to the Middle East; linking the amusing and tongue-in-cheek to the deadly serious and poignant, this is the lifelong journey of a fighter pilot.The anecdotes provided are absorbing, providing an insight into life as an Air Force pilot, but, in this book, as Colonel Ladd stresses, the focus is not on fireworks or stirring tales of derring-do. Instead, this is an articulate and absorbing account of what life is really like among a rare breed of arrogant, cocky, boisterous and fun-loving young men who readily transform into steely professionals at the controls of a fighter aircraft.From F-4 Phantom to A-10 Warthog is a terrific read: the legacy of a fighter pilot.

    At the age of 15, in 1964, Lulu - born Marie Lawrie in Glasgow - was already a star with her international hit song 'Shout'. At 18 she stole hearts as an English schoolgirl to Sidney Poitier's teacher with the movie hit 'To Sir With Love'. At 21, she married a Bee Gee, Maurice Gibb, and tied as winner of the Eurovision Song Contest with 'Boom-Bang-a-Bang'. Yet in 1993 she reached No.1 with 'Relight My Fire' (with Take That). Nearly forty years at the top of the showbiz tree, Lulu has never been afraid to experiment with new trends, and her book reflects the daring that took a girl from a Glasgow tenement to international stardom - as 'To Sir With Love' says, 'from crayons to perfume'.I DON’T WANT TO FIGHT (the title of a song Lulu wrote and Tina Turner recorded) is the devastatingly candid autobiography of a singer who has never shirked from facing anything.

    A must-read about these magnificent but sometimes deadly creatures—thoroughly revised, expanded, and updated

    Cancer Wardile Chiri depicts how he managed to escape from the clutches of this deadly disease with the help of medicine, mind power and ofcourse laughter.

    Some of those would come at the local level, where McKibben joins forces with a Vermont beekeeper raising his hives as part of the growing trend toward local food. Other solutions would come from a much larger fight against the fossil-fuel industry as a whole.Oil and Honey is McKibben’s account of these two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight—from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels, telling the story of raising one year’s honey crop and building a social movement that’s still cresting.

    Nanny Mary was the wily matriarch, who would do almost anything to survive, including stealing from her seven children. Her nerve, humour and sheer determination were also the glue that held the family together. Roberta was born to a father Roberta’s mother adored, but that she herself would never know.In this memoir, Roberta Taylor travels to the emotional heart of her childhood to reveal the lives led by the men and women who influenced her most in her formative years. Too Many Mothers is a portrait of an embattled family at war with itself and the outside world. From petty crime to pet monkeys, tender romance to emotional blackmail, illegitimacy, adoption and even murder, Roberta Taylor has written a bittersweet and ultimately unforgettable memoir of her early life.

    Two loving parents, a beautiful home, and grandparents that doted on her. Life was a dream until the day that changed everything. Sparrow's perfect life was ripped away at age three in one tragic moment that would forever change her. Follow her on her journey as she tells the story of her traumatic childhood and how she fought hard to stay strong despite her circumstances. In Riding Standing Up, Spaulding’s compelling storytelling will have you on the edge of your seat. Get ready to laugh out loud and cry more tears than you’d like as you follow her on her journey to empowerment, never knowing what’s around the corner. Brutally honest, truth-teller Sparrow Spaulding has been an unsung antiheroine…until now. She shows us we don’t have to be perfect to be worthy and that there’s power in being real.

    For most of the time she lived there she kept a diary, noting the effects of the changing seasons and writing about her encounters with dogs and humans. The book is a distillation of those diaries: an affectionate and enthralling portrait - warts and all - of life on Putney Common. Never has Jilly Cooper written more lyrically about flowers, trees, birds and the natural world; more tellingly about the sorrows - as well as the joys - of caring for dogs and children; or more outrageously about the gossip, illicit romances and jealousies of life in a small community.

    That is what troubles animal-phobic, robotics engineer Smith who just got married. He learns that his bride’s dream is to have a farm where there are lots of animals and she can rescue ex-race horses to retrain and find them new homes. But according to a Meyers-Briggs Personality Test that they took for fun, their marriage is doomed. There is only one problem: the newlyweds took the test after the wedding. Whether Smith is chasing a cow named Pork Chop through the woods with a rope, getting locked in a tack room by the family pony, being snubbed by his wife’s dog, or unsuccessfully trying to modernize their barn using the latest technology, the odds are stacked against him. It seems like everything with four legs is out to get him. Will the animals win, forcing Smith to admit defeat, or will he fight to keep his family and the farm together? Enjoy the true, warm, and frequently hilarious stories of Smith’s journey along the bumpy road from his urban robotics lab to a new life on a rural Virginia farm.

    But the glory of each essay lies in Childs's ability to portray the sometimes brutal beauty of the wilderness, to capture the individual essence of wild creatures, to transport the reader beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom.

    In Deakin's glorious meditation on wood, the "fifth element"as it exists in nature, in our culture, and in our souls the reader accompanies Deakin through the woods of Britain, Europe, Kazakhstan, and Australia in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with trees.Deakin lives in forest shacks, goes "coppicing" in Suffolk, swims beneath the walnut trees of the Haut-Languedoc, and hunts bushplums with Aboriginal women in the outback. Along the way, he ferrets out the mysteries of woods, detailing the life stories of the timber beams composing his Elizabethan house and searching for the origin of the apple.As the world's forests are whittled away, Deakin's sparkling prose evokes woodlands anarchic with life, rendering each tree as an individual, living being. At once a traveler's tale and a splendid work of natural history, Wildwood reveals, amid the world's marvelous diversity, that which is universal in human experience.