It is a story about the ordinary things - family life, happiness, ambition, and love, but it is also about adventures - meeting princes and presidents, visiting Death Row in America, exploring the sex clubs of Copenhagen. It is a story of a boy blessed with wit and what he got up to and the people he met growing up in the most wonderful city in all the world in those extraordinary years after the Second World War. For Odd Boy Out is about more than Gyles and his exploits: it is also a kaleidoscopic portrait of Britain from the 1950s onwards, featuring a cast drawn from politics, the media, swinging London, stage and screen, from Laurence Olivier to Twiggy.By turns hilarious and moving, and chock full of unforgettable stories, Odd Boy Out is the unexpected and candid autobiography of one of the country's most unlikely personalities. Yet at root it is a powerful and passionate exploration of childhood - how our heritage, our parents and our upbringing make us who we are. ___________________ 'Staggeringly brilliant, funny and touching, I loved it' Joanna Lumley

    With 75 million fans and its popularity soaring in every corner of the country, NASCAR is a 200-mile-an-hour traveling tent-and-revival show, a platinum-plated,multibillion-dollar V-8 hero machine -- a sports entertainment empire built at the very crossroads of pop culture, corporate commerce, and American mythology.Smart, funny, and profane, Sunday Money is the kaleidoscopic account of an entire season on the NASCAR circuit. Driving 48,000 miles in a tiny motorhome, writer Jeff MacGregor and his wife, an award-winning photographer, covered 36 races at 23 tracks in 18 states, from Daytona to Darlington, New Hampshire to California, from the Wal-Mart to the Waldorf, profiling the lives of superstar drivers like Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart, their crews, and their fans, across the grinding reach of a 40-week season.But this is not just a behind-the-scenes chronicle of America's loudest pastime. It is the story of a hundred stories; of red states and blue, of splendid Rebel lizards and golden Yankee hotshoes, of mystic true believersand their holy roll of honored ghosts. In the tradition of On the Road, Travels with Charley, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Sunday Money is a snapshot of American culture -- of race, religion, class, sex, money, politics, and fame -- taken from the window of a moving car, a brilliantly observed, keenly rendered, anddarkly comic portrait of America.

    You will be born in New Mexico. You will get your big break at an acting camp. You will get into a bizarre confrontation outside a nightclub with actor Scott Caan. Even better, at each critical juncture of your life, you will choose how to proceed. You will decide whether to try out for Doogie Howser, M.D. You will decide whether to spend years struggling with your sexuality. You will decide what kind of caviar you want to eat on board Elton John’s yacht. Choose correctly and you’ll find fame, fortune, and true love. Choose incorrectly and you’ll find misery, heartbreak, and a hideous death by piranhas. All this, plus magic tricks, cocktail recipes, embarrassing pictures from your time as a child actor, and even a closing song. Yes, if you buy one book this year, congratulations on being above the American average, but make that book Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography!

    The closest thing he had to a job was eating his parents’ food, sitting on his parents’ couch, and watching The Price is Right. An amateur magician, he spent the rest of his time practicing card tricks and rope tricks. And though he could tie four different slipknots, the necktie posed some difficulties.Rick’s father, a successful Michigan attorney, told Rick it was time to move out and enter the real world. Rick certainly wasn’t going to get a job, so he went to law school instead.This is the story of Rick’s journey from childhood to lawyerhood.In Lawyer Boy, Rick uses the skills he developed as a magician to succeed in class, and learns how to become a lawyer without becoming his father. His journey through law school was exhausting, exciting, and infuriating, and, the way he tells it, so funny it’s criminal.

    We may be delicate and ornamental on the outside, she said, but inside, we're strong and fiery.Reese's Southern heritage informs her whole life, and she loves sharing the joys of Southern living with practically everyone she meets. She takes the South wherever she goes with bluegrass, big holiday parties, and plenty of Dorothea's fried chicken. It's reflected in how she entertains, decorates her home, and makes holidays special for her kids - not to mention how she talks, dances, and does her hair (in this audiobook, you will learn Reese's fail-proof, only slightly insane hot-roller technique). Reese loves sharing Dorothea's most delicious recipes as well as her favorite Southern traditions, from midnight barn parties to backyard bridal showers, magical Christmas mornings to rollicking honky-tonks.It's easy to bring a little bit of Reese's world into your home, no matter where you live. After all, there's a Southern side to every place in the world, right?

    His memoir is a funny, thrilling, and ruthlessly honest exhumation of his drinking life and a candid account of his first 90 days without alcoholTom traces his alcoholism back to his British boyhood at Eton College, England's oldest and most exclusive boarding school, where the boys had to wear tail suits to class and there was a school pub. He delves into his aristocratic family's well-documented fondness for the bottle and covers his own drinking apprenticeship as a trainee journalist on London's famously alcohol-sodden newspapers.Whether he is getting arrested for drunk driving at the age of 15, climbing naked into his friends' and colleagues' beds, or simply trying to file an emergency front-page update while reeling from a cocktail of Ecstacy and magic mushrooms, Tom takes the reader on an addictive journey into the insanity of intoxication—all too often followed by a mossy tongue, a dull headache, and one burning question: "What the hell did I do last night?"

    In Talking as Fast as I Can, Lauren Graham hits pause for a moment and looks back on her life, sharing laugh-out-loud stories about growing up, starting out as an actress, and, years later, sitting in her trailer on the Parenthood set and asking herself, “Did you, um, make it?” She opens up about the challenges of being single in Hollywood (“Strangers were worried about me; that’s how long I was single!”), the time she was asked to audition her butt for a role, and her experience being a judge on Project Runway (“It’s like I had a fashion-induced blackout”). In “What It Was Like, Part One,” Graham sits down for an epic Gilmore Girls marathon and reflects on being cast as the fast-talking Lorelai Gilmore. The essay “What It Was Like, Part Two” reveals how it felt to pick up the role again nine years later, and what doing so has meant to her. Some more things you will learn about Lauren: She once tried to go vegan just to bond with Ellen DeGeneres, she’s aware that meeting guys at awards shows has its pitfalls (“If you’re meeting someone for the first time after three hours of hair, makeup, and styling, you’ve already set the bar too high”), and she’s a card-carrying REI shopper (“My bungee cords now earn points!”). Including photos and excerpts from the diary Graham kept during the filming of the recent Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, this book is like a cozy night in, catching up with your best friend, laughing and swapping stories, and—of course—talking as fast as you can.

    Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.” So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears. It’s a love letter. To life. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.

    What a collection! If this doesn't make you smile, then you're not even trying."A Trip to the Hardware Store"These humorous essays explore such quirky topics as: disastrous home repairs, ("A Trip to the Hardware Store"), an unfortunate dinner party ("Dinner is Served"), the truth about lazy people ("Lazy Bones"), the weird life of a debt collector ("Your Account is Past Due") and obsessions with gadgets ("Gadget Girl"). Other essays examine how surreal the aging process is ("Where Did the Time Go?"), why you shouldn't judge a person by their job ("Beyond Belief"), and how to complicate simple transactions ("High Finance"). "I'm Not Talking About You, Of Course"A collection of humorous insights into important topics ranging from annoying pet people ("I'm Not Talking About You, Of Course"), to analyzing your inner child ("Irrational Fears"), to living like the Amish in the aftermath of a hurricane ("A Jolt of Electricity"). Other essays examine just how much damage can be caused by a sneeze ("It All Started with a Loud Sneeze"), why it is so complicated to buy a tube of toothpaste ("Ask Me No Questions"), how a parent's obsessive hobbies can become an inescapable vortex ("Crazy Hobbies"), and why spending the night in a sleep clinic is like being abducted by probing aliens ("Nightmare at the Sleep Clinic").If you don't see yourself in each of these entertaining essays, then I'm not talking about you, of course.

    isn't it?'A John Cleese Twitter question ['What is your pet peeve?'], first sparked the 'Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops' blog, which grew over three years into one bookseller's collection of ridiculous conversations on the shop floor. From 'Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?' to the hunt for a paperback which could forecast the next year's weather; and from 'I've forgotten my glasses, please read me the first chapter' to 'Excuse me... is this book edible?: here is a book for heroic booksellers and booklovers everywhere.This full-length collection illustrated by the Brothers McLeod also includes top 'Weird Things' from bookshops around the world.

    There, any romantic visions they'd had of restoring a villa or stamping their entwined feet in vats of Chianti grapes disappeared faster than the chief witness in a Cosa Nostra trial. Shamus and Gill's tiny apartment in Catania was located in a grim neighborhood opposite a triple-X cinema and a shop selling coffins, nearby Mount Etna erupted soon after their arrival, a mystery ailment left Shamus in a neck brace, they crashed a Vespa, and they had regular dealings with at least one Mafioso. This, then, is an Italian sea change with grit. But it's also a story of optimism, endurance, and acceptance; an exploration of the minutiae of Sicilian culture, history, food, and religion; and an example of how to find beauty—and humor—in the most unexpected of places.

    For their trail horses, they adopted wild mustangs from the US Bureau of Land Management that were perfectly adapted to the rocky terrain and harsh conditions of desert and mountain travel. A meticulously planned but sometimes unpredictable route brought them face to face with snowpack, downpours, and wildfire; unrelenting heat, raging rivers, and sheer cliffs; jumping cactus, rattlesnakes, and charging bull moose; sickness, injury, and death. But they also experienced a special camaraderie with each other and with the mustangs. Through it all, they had a constant traveling companion—a cameraman, shooting for the documentary film Unbranded. The trip’s inspiration and architect, Ben Masters, is joined here by the three other riders, Ben Thamer, Thomas Glover, and Jonny Fitzsimons; two memorable teachers and horse trainers; and the film’s producers and intrepid cameramen in the telling of this improbable story of adventure and self-discovery.

    With an unforgettable comic touch, Bank skillfully teases out issues of the heart, puts a new spin on the mating dance, and captures in perfect pitch what it's like to be a young woman coming of age in America today.

    From New York to Alaska, he tries to fend for himself without his trusty PA and life support, the unflappable Charmaine, for whom contentment lies in Jesus Christ and custard creams.With his blend of waspish wit and mischievous charm, Steward seeks out normal Americans, such as Joe le Taxi, the former NYPD officer who was one of the first on the scene at the Twin Towers and now runs an extortionate executive taxi service; Pam and Bob, a paranoid psychiatrist and a failed actor who once saw the back of Meryl Streep s head; Taylor the Alaskan bushwhacker who was raised by wolves and revels in their scat; Jeb the Yosemite inn-sitter who lives his life at the pace of a Ford Model T; Kacey Musgraves, the controversial country music star staying at the farm in Tennessee; and Sheriff Duke of Calhoun County, South Carolina, who reintroduces Steward to the long (and armed) arm of the law.For anyone at a crossroads, contemplating a temporary or permanent career break, this affectionate travel romp is essential reading. Journeying coast-to-coast across the US with Steward might just remind you that, despite the post-Trump hysteria, there are many normal and decent Americans out there

    Now she tells us what became of that little girl--and her lifelong quest to find the perfect country home.