This collection of seventeen Caribbean short studies is compiled for use in secondary schools, and embraces both the old and the new of West Indian writing from the 1930s to the present day.The stories contained in the collection are: "Backfire" by Shirley Tappin; "Paradise Lost" by Ida Ramesar; "Chung Lee" by Undine Guiseppi; "Give and Take" by Robert Henry; "The Kite" by Barnabus J Ramon-Fortuna; "Horace's Luck" by Neville Guiseppi; "Mama's Theme Song" by Joy Moore; "The Teddy Bear" by C Arnold Thomasos; "De Trip" by Joy Clarke; "The Hustlers" by Flora Spencer; "Journey by Night" by Undine Guiseppi; "The New Teacher" by Ninnie Seereeram; "Up the Wind Laka Notoo-Boy" by Ian Robertson; "After the Game" by Barnabus J Ramon-Fortuna; "Ramgoat Salvation" by Ida Ramesar; "Tantie Gertrude" by Oliver Flax; and "The Cousins" by Joy Moore.

    But unlike other women their age, their conversations also turned to more serious issues, issues their “non-breast cancer” friends couldn’t have imagined or understood.Their breast cancer diagnoses came at very different phases of their young lives. Patti was 24, single, and forging her way in the corporate world. Jana was planning her wedding at age 27, and bravely walked down the aisle wearing a wig and breast prosthesis. Jennifer, also 27, was five months pregnant when she was diagnosed, and endured surgery and chemotherapy during the pregnancy. Kim found her lump at age 30 while planning her son’s second birthday party, and faced the issues of raising a toddler while she underwent treatment.Nordie’s at Noon shares the personal stories of each of these extraordinary women. A source of humor, strength, inspiration, and education, the book will speak to anyone who has ever been diagnosed with cancer or faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge. A celebration of friendship and of living life to the fullest, Nordie’s at Noon is also a book that will encourage women everywhere to be proactive with their health-and realize that no one is “too young” for breast cancer.

    Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. In Gender Outlaws, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers — new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected mainstream news sources. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.

    

    Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos--and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure--yawns wide.Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left," writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky--when we were told to pay attention to our breath--we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon."

    Then a travel agent convinced him to spend his vacation in India. Amazed by what he saw in the land of sacred cows and shocking poverty, Jaume was transformed.That experience lead him to reconsider the world he lived in and caused him to think that he might do something to make it a little better. He devoted himself to helping a small orphanage in Bombay, one that was about to close its doors and send its forty children back to the streets (and the brothels) from which they had been rescued. Jaume seized the moment, determined not to let that happen. As a consequence, he changed his life, and much more as well.In Bombay Smiles, Jaume Sanllorente gives us an insightful and loving vision of a country of great contrasts. He reveals that the secret of his own happiness is in seeking happiness for others.Bombay Smiles is a story of loneliness, ransoms, dangers, injustices, threats of death, and acts of courage, which give an example to follow in spite of the adversities one might meet. It is a lesson of wise love, surrender, sacrifice, and hope, which invites us to start on the path toward a better world.Jaume Sanllorente was born in 1976 in Barcelona, Spain. His nonprofit organization, Bombay Smiles, provides schools, homes, and health care to thousands of children in India.

    

    He slept outside and learned to say good-bye to his amiguitos each time his family moved to a new town. He went to school and taught himself to read and write English and filled paper pads with rivers of ink as he walked down the street after school. And when he grew up, he became the United States Poet Laureate and read his poems aloud on the steps of the Library of Congress. If he could do all of that . . . what could you do? With this illustrated poem of endless possibility, Juan Felipe Herrera and Lauren Castillo breathe magic into the hopes and dreams of readers searching for their place in life.

    Though it is intensely personal, he decided to publish it in the hope that some of those who sit on the mourning bench for children would find his words giving voice to their own honoring and grieving. What he learned, to his surprise, is that in its particularity there is universality. Many who have lost children have written him. But many who have lost other relatives have done so as well, along with many who have experienced loss in forms other than the death of relatives or friends. The sharply particular words of Lament, so he has learned, give voice to the pain of many forms of loss. This book, Lament For A Son, has become a love-song. Every lament, after all, is a love-song. Will love-songs one day no longer be laments?

    So, after studying Muay Thai, Krav Maga, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and boxing, he decided, at age forty, that it was finally time to fight his first—and only—mixed martial arts match: all in the name of experience and transcending ancient fears.An insightful and moving rumination on the nature of fighting, Why We Fight takes us on his journey from the bleachers to the ring. Using his own training as an opportunity to understand how the sport illuminates basic human impulses, Rosenblatt weaves together cultural history, criticism, biology, and anthropology to understand what happens to the human body and mind when under attack, and to explore why he, a self-described “cowardly boy from the suburbs,” discovered so much meaning in putting his body, and others’, at risk.From the psychology of fear to the physiology of pain, from Ukrainian shtetls to Brooklyn boxing gyms, from Lord Byron to George Plimpton, Why We Fight is a fierce inquiry into the abiding appeal of our most conflicted and controversial fixation, interwoven with a firsthand account of what happens when a mild-mannered intellectual decides to step into the ring for his first real showdown.

    That lethal assignment brought the undercover operation to an end in March 2015, and the resulting string of high-profile arrests eviscerated the criminal organization.Giovanni’s Ring is not simply a chronicle of Giovanni Rocco’s adventures in the murky and dangerous Mafia world he inhabited, but also a fascinating window into the psychological struggles that such a life inevitably entails.“Rocco conveys the frustrations of his double life poignantly throughout this revelatory read, a captivating true-crime thriller from start to finish and a new gem for Mafia book fans.” —Booklist

    As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other. .

    Louis Cardinals for seven years when he quit at the height of his career to tell about the dehumanizing side of the game—about the fraud and the payoffs, the racism, drug abuse, and incredible violence. The original publication of Out of Their League shocked readers and provoked the outraged response that rocked the sports world in the 1970s. But his memoir is also a moving description of a man who struggled for social justice and personal liberation. Meggyesy has continued this journey and remains an active champion for players’ rights through his work with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA). He provides a preface for this Bison Books edition.

     A powerful true story revealing a remarkable relationship between a dying son - and a mother that refuses to let him go. At the age of 10, Deryn was diagnosed with Leukaemia. Then 18 months later he developed another rare form of cancer called Langerhan’s cell sarcoma. Only five other people in the world have it. He is the youngest of them all and the only person in the world known to be fighting it alongside another cancer, making him one in seven billion. Told there was no hope of survival, after four years of intensive treatment, exhausted by his fight and with just days left to live, Deryn planned his own funeral. But, Deryn’s desperate mother, Callie would not let him give in. Battling medical errors, impossible odds and years of hardship as the cancer consumed his body and their world, they looked for more answers. After making some startling discoveries and taking massive chances - something began to change… Would their lives as a family ever be the same again?

    As she struggled for survival in the ultimate boys’ club, she called on her fierce and humourous spirit to push back against the whims of a domineering and patriarchal organization. Later in life, feeling unfulfilled in her post-military career, she realized that finding her true path forward meant she had to go back to the beginning and revisit the truth of what she had experienced all those years ago.“Incredibly engaging and moving. Armstrong deftly handles the tough and challenging moments (and there are many) as well as humorous ones. Great read from beginning-to-end.” — Timothy Caulfield, author of The Cure for Everything