Touchdown could mean that we've just won another football National Championship or it could indicate that a tornado is on the ground.  I could never be a storm chaser. I'm the one the storm chases. Funnels circle around me like shark fins as I bow my head in a school hallway, kneel down in a convent, or give birth to a newborn baby wailing in unison with the tornado sirens.  I huddle with toddlers in showers and beg for shelter in a McDonald's freezer. I remain a sitting duck in a second-floor apartment, and find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time while in the emergency room with storm victims.Life in the Rocket City is a thrill ride which is not for the faint of heart, this I know. So brace yourself for a front row seat on a ride through Tornado Valley! Alabama is the home of the world's deadliest twisters, and Huntsville is in the heart of the arena. Our space history is out of this world, but our tornado history will blow you away.Take a rollercoaster ride through the history of Alabama tornadoes before plunging into the gripping story of the Day of Devastation. Witness the stars falling on Alabama in 1833. Then get ready for the sky to fall! The plot twists as Huntsville's torrid tornado past comes alive in the 1974 Super Tornado Outbreak. The rollercoaster corkscrews as it encounters an unexpected twister in 1989 that slingshots the reader into the angry vortex on Airport Road. The ride cruises before taking another gut-wrenching dive that catapults its riders into an inverted twist from yet another Anderson Hills tornado in 1995. The town turns upside-down but Huntsville survives, revives, and thrives. But the worst is yet to come. Another tornado season is just around the corner. Beware of the month of April, especially on a Wednesday.The warning sirens wail, we're bombarded by softball-sized hail, and an EF3 tornado slams into the jail. It's just another day in Alabama, but the countdown clock is ticking. The next tornado warning could be "the one." Our voice drops to a whisper when we mention an EF5. We realize life is too short. The coaster accelerates. Can you feel the torque? We have no idea what's around the next bend. Suddenly, the nightmare comes true as the ride zooms out of control, this time in a free-fall on April 27, 2011. Alabama is bombarded by a record 62 tornadoes in one day. Abruptly, the ride comes to a screeching halt. The adrenaline rush subsides. You've just experienced Huntsville's Havoc. Immediately the passengers ask one another, "Do you want to ride again?" Some will and some swear, never again.

    

    Covering everything from adventure, war, murder and slavery to espionage, including the stories of the real war horse, who killed Rasputin, Agatha Christie's greatest mystery and Hitler's English girlfriend, these tales deserve to be told.

    The dream of a railroad across America had at last come true. This book tells the story of swaggering men with big plans, of an America emerging from the Civil War and reaching its manifest destiny. The men who imagined the transcontinental railroad were impassioned profiteers, an unlikely, often ruthless band, guilty of both financial double-dealing and ferocious ingenuity. When ice delayed operations in the Sierra Nevadas, the men of the Central Pacific formed the Summit Ice Company and sold their problem to California saloons. When herds of buffalo ripped up the tracks, the men of the Union Pacific brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of them. (Thus the legend of Buffalo Bill was born.) While his partners finagled in Washington and on Wall Street, Jack Casement, a former Union general, dressed in a fur coat, a Cossack hat, and shining cavalry boots and carrying a pistol and a bullwhip, drove the workers of the Union Pacific to new track-laying records. Meanwhile, from the West, thousands of Chinese immigrants blasted, climbed, and inched their way through the perilous California mountains. The railroad transformed the country forever. It decimated the Plains Indian culture by destroying the herds of buffalo that sustained it. It augmented the timber and steel industries; it opened up the West for commerce. Farms grew up along the length of the rails. Thousands of immigrants from Asia and Europe came here to build the iron road. Most important, it united a nation. The story of the railroad is capitalist theater, starring powerful politicians and generals and con artists. Set in opulent parlor cars, well-heeled boardrooms, and rowdy frontier towns, on desolate plains and deadly gorges, it is a story of vision and corruption, of empire building at its most vulgar and glorious. John Williams combines scholarship with personalities, historical analysis with plain old tall tales, to tell a story that will appeal to readers of American history and adventure and to lovers of the American West. The Transcontinental Railroad is an epic of every sense.

    The search for little Pearl consumed the next several weeks, and the story became front page news all over the United States. Hundreds of residents from the nearby towns of Waldron and Booneville Arkansas helped in the search, and a mysterious mountain hermit seemed to hold the secret to Pearl's disappearance. The incredible events that followed contributed to a mountain legend that still exists today.

    

     Piece by piece, like a giant Victorian jigsaw, the evidence forms a fascinating picture, but one with a hole at its heart – a hole that will not be filled until the baffling mystery is solved.. Do they ever solve it and complete the picture? After ten years research in North Wales, a new piece of evidence and a distant memory cause a sudden change in venue which reveals the reason for the conspiracy of silence and the staggering truth about his mother.

    That same year, he finished third on the Big Wave World Tour, despite only surfing three of the five events. Chris’s mantra is Dream it, See it, Believe it, Achieve it. With his infectious enthusiasm, Chris tells how he pulled off death-defying antics, time and again, overcame overwhelming obstacles and manoeuvred around the many random twists of fate to achieve his goals and fulfil his dreams.

    The dos and don'ts of travelling and staying in Iceland. Five chapters with multiple tips in each one explain what is expected of you as a traveller - as well as some bonus tips on what you can do.

    “Can a doctor put this back on?” one patient asked a befuddled registration clerk. A nurse recalls in another submission, "He came rushing out of the vehicle and practically mowed my patient and me down as he rushed to the center of the lobby and screamed, “I need help!”"First responders share what prompted them to enter the healthcare field. It's undeniable that some of you have saving lives in your blood.Medical professionals share submissions that will make your blood boil, but there are no shortages of laughs to create the balance you've all come to love.

    What followed is the American epic, written in blue and gray and gore. So how is that 150 years later, we are still fighting over why the war was fought? Few historical questions stir up as much passionate confusion as that one—even though scholars consider it a settled question. In this ebook, veteran TIME writer, David Von Drehle explores process of forgetting, denying, and rediscovering the meaning of the Civil War.

     Raised in the confines of evangelical Christianity from a young age, Cassie Fox served and sought the God she loved with all of her heart. A true believer, she attended Bible college and became an ordained minister, fervently preaching the Gospel to others with passion. After years of living a life dedicated to her faith in God, she learned information that cast her religious beliefs in a different light. In this raw, transparent, and sometimes heartbreaking autobiography, Cassie Fox shares her gripping journey as she battled and agonized over the implications of her newfound understanding until she ultimately found peace and healing in the least expected of places. Walk through this incredible, life changing story of triumph, and discover the message of optimism and hope she found at the end. Buy Black Sheep: My Journey from Evangelical Christianity to Atheism today!

    This volume delivers an eye-popping backstage peek into the lusty private lives and cutthroat careers of Hollywood’s most memorable bad girls over the decades. The iconoclastic Hollywood Divas presented are: Jean Arthur, Lucille Ball, Tallulah Bankhead, Theda Bara, Drew Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, Kim Basinger, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Brett Butler, Mariah Carey, Cher, Joan Collins, Joan Crawford, Dorothy Dandridge, Bette Davis, Dolores Del Rio, Marlene Dietrich, Shannen Doherty, Patty Duke, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Kay Francis, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Greer Garson, Paulette Goddard, Melanie Griffith, Jean Harlow, Susan Hayward, Rita Hayworth, Sonja Henie, Katharine Hepburn, Miriam Hopkins, Whitney Houston, Betty Hutton, Janet Jackson, Grace Kelly, Veronica Lake, Hedy Lamarr, Jennifer Lopez, Jeanette MacDonald, Madonna, Jayne Mansfield, Liza Minnelli, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Montez, Demi Moore, Mae Murray, Vera Ralston, Joan Rivers, Julia Roberts, Roseanne, Diane Ross, Meg Ryan, Norma Shearer, Cybill Shepherd, Britney Spears, Sharon Stone, Barbra Streisand, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor, Lana Turner, Lupe Velez, Mae West, Shelley Winters, Natalie Wood, and Loretta Young.A must-have volume for every pop-culture fanatic, Hollywood Divas promises to tantalize you with juicy tidbits and saucy scandals that earned each of these devilish darlings the title of diva.

    Here, historian Alexander Ivanov reveals their fears and betrayals, privilege and debauchery, conspiracies and rivalries, love and tragedy as they forged Russia into one of the world's greatest empires. No ruler in history has embodied the oppressive domination of these rulers more vividly than Alexander Ivanov's opening subject, Tsar Ivan IV, the first of all the Russian tsars, known to history as Ivan the Terrible. Although a gifted ruler who did much to unite and improve the conditions in his primitive country, Ivan was also a notorious sadist who delighted in torturing and murdering anyone who displeased him. Ivan's death in 1584 ushered in the Time of Troubles, thirty-five years of famine, plague, and war that crippled the nation. A series of rulers attempted to cope with the devastation, beginning with Ivan's successor Boris Godunov. Finally, grasping for stability, Russia's nobles begged young Michael Romanov, the great-nephew of Ivan's beloved wife Anastasia, to take the throne. Michael successfully united the war-torn and ravaged nation and founded a dynasty that would rule for 300 years. The Romanov line produced Russia's most brilliant yet most unconventional sovereign: Peter the Great, a towering figure of a man whose restless, creative mind led him on an inexorable quest to modernize and civilize the still backward nation. The reforms he enacted so enraged nobles and peasants alike that Peter had to quash a series of rebellions to keep his crown. Ruthlessly stifling dissent and massacring rebels, he ultimately cowed the Russian people into submission, achieving a legacy that nearly equaled his ambitions. It was left to a woman - and a foreigner, at that - to lead the nation further out of the darkness. German princess Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, known to the world as Catherine the Great, absorbed the principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and applied them to a country built on the backs of millions of serfs. However ineffective some of her policies, in the end, she made Russia a major player on the European stage. Serfdom was finally abolished in the nineteenth century, but it would be decades before Russian peasants could own land of their own and learn to farm it productively. The boyars and tsars clung to power until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The sad fate of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, marked the end of the absolute power that Ivan the Terrible had so exploited. The abuses would continue but under a new and drastically different form of government.

    He is just good old “Mr average” but you'll find that he does have an extremely interesting story to tell.This is about Alfie Watson and his coming of age story of life on a feral sink estate in the heart of 1950's England. It's a story that began as a diary to pass to his grandchildren and became a beautifully written account of his tormented life. The reader will be taken back in time to a period of post war deprivation that would scar Alfie for life. A disciplinarian father and a depraved mother meant that chastisement was always a tactile experience. Abuse in this family, took on many guises, often with heart rending conclusions." via Itunes