Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer


Lynne Cox - 2004
    By age sixteen, she had broken all records for swimming the English Channel. Her daring eventually led her to the Bering Strait, where she swam five miles in thirty-eight-degree water in just a swimsuit, cap, and goggles. In between those accomplishments, she became the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, narrowly escaped a shark attack off the Cape of Good Hope, and was cheered across the twenty-mile Cook Strait of New Zealand by dolphins. She even swam a mile in the Antarctic.Lynne writes the same way she swims, with indefatigable spirit and joy, and shares the beauty of her time in the water with a poet's eye for detail. She has accomplished yet another feat--writing a new classic of sports memoir.

The Invisible Woman


Helen Walmsley-Johnson - 2015
    Or is it that seventy is the new fifty? Yet fashionable clothes shops cater for little but elfin twenty-year-olds; magazines carry little but articles about appearing younger. Heaven forbid you try to apply for a job…Older women are permitted to be either part of the slippers and cardigans brigade, or to cling desperately to their youth and insist on being ‘young at heart’. Can’t there be a third way? A way to age with grace, security, beauty and adventure, and a way to keep your identity against a growing tide of voices telling you how you’d be happier if only you looked ten years younger.Covering topics from family, finances and work to cosmetics, fashion and sex, The Invisible Woman – which is also Helen’s Guardian column nom de plume – is a new sort of book about ageing; one that teaches us not how to avoid it, but how to enjoy it, grow with it, and thrive.

The Address Book


Sophie Calle - 1998
    Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, Calle copied the pages before returning it to its anonymous owner. She then embarked on a search to come to know this stranger by contacting listed individuals--in essence, following him through the map of his acquaintances. Originally published as a serial in the newspaper "Liberation" over the course of one month, her incisive written accounts with friends, family and colleagues, juxtaposed with photographs, yield vivid subjective impressions of the address book's owner, Pierre D., while also suggesting ever more complicated stories as information is parsed and withheld by the people she encounters. Collaged through a multitude of details--from the banal to the luminous, this fragile and strangely intimate portrait of Pierre D. is a prism through which to see the desire for, and the elusivity of, knowledge. Upon learning of this work and its publication in the newspaper, Pierre D. expressed his anger, and Calle agreed not to republish the work until after his death. Until then, "The Address Book" had only been described in English--as the work of the character Maria Turner, whom Paul Auster based on Calle in his novel "Leviathan"; and in "Double Game," Calle's monograph which converses with Auster's novel. This is the first trade publication in English of "The Address Book" (Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles released a suite of lithographs modeled on the original tabloid pages from "Liberation" in an edition of 24). The book has the physical weight and feel of an actual address book with a new design of text and images which allow the story to unfold and be savored by the reader.

Monkeys on the Road: One family's vanlife adventure south in search of a simpler life


Mary Hollendoner - 2021
    Too much stress and not enough time with her family left her feeling that her priorities were all wrong. So she and her husband quit their jobs, pulled their six-year-old daughter out of school, and moved into an old camper van.They planned to take a year off to drive south in search of a simpler life. What followed were three and a half years of heart-warming personal encounters, breath-taking wilderness campsites, and occasionally terrifying situations…...In Mexico, an angry mob surrounded them on a remote road and threatened them with rocks, but just a few hours later, a local family welcomed them into their home, sharing everything they had....While barreling down the highway in Colombia, their van’s battery exploded, filling their home-on-wheels with noxious fumes. Then the engine died entirely while parked in no-man’s-land between Ecuador and Peru, leaving them stranded for a month in a tiny border town. ...They learned first-hand about South American politics when they got caught among thousands of Venezuelan refugees trying to cross the Colombian border, and again when a revolution erupted around them in Bolivia and trapped them in the capital city among protests and road blocks....And they got caught in one of the world's strictest COVID quarantines in Argentina, living for over a year in a small mountain town there.Join them on these and other adventures in this feel-good read about a family trying to find their place in the world.

Australia's Strangest Mysteries #2


John Pinkney - 2012
    Someone [the murderer?] had covered him with a small strip of carpet.Nearby, in a ditch,lay Mrs Chandler - her face and torso bafflingly blanketed in beer cartons.The discovery made international headlines. It swiftly emerged that Dr Bogle, a brilliant specialist in solid state physics, had recently accepted a research post in Washington – and had been preparing to fly there, with his wife and children. Mrs Chandler, who’d worked as a nurse before her marriage, had been at the same New Year’s party with Gilbert Bogle the evening before. They had left separately.Scientists found that the pair had died of acute heart failure – but they could suggest no cause. There were no signs of violence: no smothering or strangulation; no hypodermic marks; no evidence, in the body tissues, of poisons, or radioactive substances of any kind.From the morning the bodies were found, the Bogle-Chandler conundrum would perplex the law’s keenest forensic minds...

Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn Who They Are


Carl Safina - 2020
    By showing how others teach and learn, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside individual creatures in their free-living communities, this book offers a very privileged glimpse behind the curtain of life on Earth, and helps inform the answer to that most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?

The Broken Road: George Wallace and a Daughter’s Journey to Reconciliation


Peggy Wallace Kennedy - 2019
    In the summer of 1963, Peggy Wallace Kennedy was a young girl watching her father stand in a schoolhouse door as he tried to block two African-American students from entering the University of Alabama. This man, former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate George Wallace, was notorious for his hateful rhetoric and his political stunts. But he was also a larger-than-life father to young Peggy, who was taught to smile, sit straight, and not speak up as her father took to the political stage. At the end of his life, Wallace came to renounce his views, although he could never attempt to fully repair the damage he caused. But Peggy, after her own political awakening, dedicated her life to spreading the new Wallace message-one of peace and compassion. In this powerful new memoir, Peggy looks back on the politics of her youth and attempts to reconcile her adored father with the man who coined the phrase “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.” Timely and timeless, The Broken Road speaks to change, atonement, activism, and racial reconciliation.

Garments Against Women


Anne Boyer - 2015
    It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complexes, dreamscapes, and information networks, tangled in chronology, landing in a heap of the future impossible. Available forms—like garments and literature—are made of the materials of history, of the hours of women’s and children’s lives, but they are mostly inadequate to the dimension, motion, and irregularity of what they contain. It’s a book about seeking to find the forms in which to think the thoughts necessary to survival, then about seeking to find the forms necessary to survive survival and survival’s requisite thoughts.“Here Anne Boyer accounts for a form of life—form of life of a woman in this century living in Kansas City apartment complexes or duplexes with names like The Kingman or Colonial Gardens, form of life of a low-rent, cake-baking intellectual parenting a Socratic daughter, form of life of a person whose body refuses to become information or pornography, which are the same. These are the confessions of Anne Boyer, a political thinker who takes notes and invents movements, social and prosodic. Ta gueule, Rousseau.” —Lisa RobertsonAnne Boyer Artist Statement:I read a lot, old works and new ones, but there were so many books that I couldn’t find. These were the books that should have contained an answer to the problem—how do we survive our survival? If a work of literature approached an answer, the answer was bent, asemic, obscured, distorted into sentimental accounts, melodrama, or pornography by literary convention established to make knowing what we needed to impossible..Sometimes the answer was deformed by the failure of survival itself—there were texts severed by their author’s severed lives, by madness, by social isolation, by early death or a long life passed always wanting it. Literature, like garments, had so often been against so many of us, enforcing and sustaining the hostilities of a world with the unequal distribution of resources and the corresponding unequal distribution of suffering..The libraries I needed were full of works written by ghosts of the dead so common their graves lacked stones, the literature of those humans whose names were never their own, whose names were mostly said aloud so that someone might make a command of them, whose names were never used as the mark of their own property—what was it they had known? How did the great human majority—women and girls, those without property, the poor and the workers and enslaved people—resist? In what forms, what languages, what codes were their poems? What possibilities inhabited their thinking, their philosophies, their politics? What names would they be called if they could choose their own? During much of the time Garments Against Women was being written, I wanted to stop writing. I wanted to stop wanting and needing to write. This was so that my daughter and I could better survive; this was also because of my disappointment with literature..But Garments Against Women exists because I failed. I failed to find the literature I needed, so I had to try to write it down. I failed, also, at refusal, failed at failing, failed at self-negating, failed at being ruined despite all that would ruin us, failed at keeping survival bare, failed at obeying history’s prohibitions, failed at being intimidated by the centuries of hostile traditions. What I failed at was not writing despite all the conditions that had been relentlessly calibrated to keep not writing sustained..Some of us write because there are problems to be solved. My life is different than it was when I wrote Garments Against Women, but there’s still a problem: the world as we know it remains the world.

Women in Dark Times


Jacqueline Rose - 2014
    Enraged by injustice, they are each in touch with what is most painful about being human, bound together by their willingness to bring the unspeakable to light.

Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season with the Wild Turkey


Joe Hutto - 1995
    The acclaimed account of an astonishing human-turkey relationship.

Miss Manners' Guide to Domestic Tranquility: The Authoritative Manual for Every Civilized Household, However Harried


Judith Martin - 1999
    Refusing to recognize that the harried household cannot meet her standards of propriety--especially since all households are now harried--Miss Manners explains how this is done.Whether your family is nuclear, blended, extended, or unrelated; whether you are single, divorced, living together, or married; at a family dinner or dinner party; engaged in combat with the neighbors or with the relatives--there is simply no substitute for the core of civility that must reside at the heart of every house, condo or apartment if it is truly to be a home.Miss Manners is prepared to sweep through your house and get rid of those lurking traces of rudeness that you were pretending not to notice.You know you are not going to be able to enjoy a pleasant and peaceful household until these few chores are done.Table of ContentsChapter One--The PeopleAllotting due space and respect to parents, children, roommates, relatives--and whoever thoseother people are whom one of them must have brought homeChapter Two--The PlaceMaking use of the rooms instead of turning them into a mess or a museum, while everybody huddles upstairsChapter Three--The RulesNegotiating compromises without having to leave home for Domestic Dispute CourtChapter Four--The SystemKeeping track of where everybody is, where they are supposed to be, and what they are supposed to be doing (if they remember)Chapter Five--The HelpGetting the housework done when you can't complain about the Servant Problem--because theservants are you and the people in the phone book who may be there sometime todayChapter Six--The VisitorsOffering hospitality without surrendering your privacy or your resources to the thanklessChapter Seven--Entertaining: The Social ContractReviving the art of not-for-profit entertaining to make friends who will love you for yourselfChapter Eight--Entertaining: The Social EventLearning to give a variety of parties, formal and informal--because it beats staying home alone watching TVChapter Nine--Entertaining: The RelativesKindling warm memories rather than heated conflict at family occasionsChapter Ten--The CommunityBeing pleasant enough to the neighbors so you're not afraid to walk out your own front doorFrom the Hardcover edition.

It's Not You, Geography, It's Me


Kristy Chambers - 2014
    For someone who hates exercise, Kristy Chambers is pretty good at running away, and coming back again when her credit cards are declined. She’s not so much an international jetsetter as a loose cannon with a passport. So, in the manner of Eat, Pray, Love, a privileged white girl takes her privileged white arse on the road in an attempt to find happiness. With a family history of mental illness that goes back generations and a complicated long-term relationship with depression, will eating all the pasta in Italy help her to find the silver lining she’s looking for? Of course it won’t. It’s pasta, not magic beans. Joined by the most unreliable travel companion of them all—her mental health—Kristy openly, honestly, and humorously recounts their adventures together.

Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays


Candace Savage - 1995
    But according to naturalist Candace Savage, “bird brain,” as a pejorative expression, should be rendered obsolete by new research on the family of corvids: crows and their close relations.The ancients who regarded these remarkable birds as oracles, bringers of wisdom, or agents of vengeance were on the right track, for corvids appear to have powers of abstraction, memory, and creativity that put them on a par with many mammals, even higher primates. Bird Brains presents these bright, brassy, and surprisingly colorful birds in a remarkable collection of full-color, close-up photographs by some two dozen of the world’s best wildlife photographers.Savage’s lively, authoritative text describes the life and behavior of sixteen representative corvid species that inhabit North America and Europe. Drawing on recent research, she describes birds that recognize each other as individuals, call one another by “name,” remember and relocate thousands of hidden food caches, engage in true teamwork and purposeful play, and generally exhibit an extraordinary degree of sophistication.

The Essential Tarot Kit: Book and Card Set


Rosalind Simmons - 2002
    Follow the simple instructions in the guidebook to discover the meanings behind the mysterious imagery of the cards and learn how to conduct your own Tarot readings.

How Clean Is Your House?


Aggie MacKenzie - 2003
    Already a runaway bestseller in the UK, How Clean Is Your House? is packed with trade secrets and inventive cleaning solutions that will get us all back on track and cleaning properly in no time. Watch and learn as the dynamic duo sweeps through a house room by room, offering top tips that will turn any home into a gleaming palace. Each chapter is packed with do’s and don’ts, step-by-steps, and amusing before-and-after “grime scene” photographs. There’s even a filth questionnaire to determine your cleanliness status. Kim and Aggie also offer ideas for surprising home remedies, such as using a banana peel to dust plants (“the dust clings to the skin and the juice nourishes the leaves.”) How Clean Is Your House? is so full of infectious fun that it will make you passionate about cleaning—no home should be without a copy.