Rules for being a man:Don't Cry; Love Sport; Play Rough; Drink Beer; Don't Talk About FeelingsBut Robert Webb has been wondering for some time now: are those rules actually any use? To anyone?Looking back over his life, from schoolboy crushes (on girls and boys) to discovering the power of making people laugh (in the Cambridge Footlights with David Mitchell), and from losing his beloved mother to becoming a husband and father, Robert Webb considers the absurd expectations boys and men have thrust upon them at every stage of life.Hilarious and heartbreaking, How Not To Be a Boy explores the relationships that made Robert who he is as a man, the lessons we learn as sons and daughters, and the understanding that sometimes you aren't the Luke Skywalker of your life - you're actually Darth Vader.

    She worked her way up playing small gigs and broke out in 1983 with She’s So Unusual, which earned her a Grammy for Best New Artist and made her the first female artist in history to have four top-five singles on a debut album. And while global fame wasn’t always what she expected, she has remained focused on what matters most. Cyndi is a gutsy real-life heroine who has never been afraid to speak her mind and stick up for a cause—whether it’s women’s rights, gay rights, or fighting against HIV/AIDS.With her trademark warmth and humor, Cyndi fearlessly writes of a life she’s lived only on her own terms.

    Just say yes!Meet Olive Persimmon. Growing up, she looked exactly like Danny DeVito, except she was thirteen and a girl. By some miracle, she grew into a relatively normal, well-adjusted thirty-something woman living in New York City—with one notable exception: she hasn’t had sex in five years, one month, three days, two-point-five hours . . . and counting.Faced with bona fide sex rut, she decides it's time to take action to save her love life and get her mojo back. Challenged by a friend to "say yes" to experiences she might normally avoid, Olive embarks on a series of adventures and explores everything from BDSM classes to cuddlers-for-hire, from foot fetishes to lessons with a top-ranked pickup artist, and more! Each awkward, funny, and sometimes downright embarrassing encounter brings Olive closer to discovering the power of saying yes—to herself, others, and life itself.For fans of Jenny Slate, this is a funny, irreverent, and honest tale of one young woman's journey to reclaim her sexuality on the fringes of New York City's sex and dating world.Readers can see for themselves how this girl next door overcame insecurities around dating, sex, and love--all with openness, honesty, and a wicked sense of humor. Along the way, readers will wonder: Will Olive ever have sex again? Will her love life be okay? Will her toe fungus come back? Does she ever find her mojo, and where was it hiding?

    In this book Sally describes a shocking story of a mother's neglect and a father's betrayal.

    Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. LeRoi Jones. Theirs are the names primarily associated with the Beat Generation. But what about Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman), Edie Parker, Elise Cowen, Diane Di Prima, and dozens of others? These female friends and lovers of the famous iconoclasts are now beginning to be recognized for their own roles in forging the Beat movement and for their daring attempts to live as freely as did the men in their circle a decade before Women's Liberation.Twenty-one-year-old Joyce Johnson, an aspiring novelist and a secretary at a New York literary agency, fell in love with Jack Kerouac on a blind date arranged by Allen Ginsberg nine months before the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an instant celebrity. While Kerouac traveled to Tangiers, San Francisco, and Mexico City, Johnson roamed the streets of the East Village, where she found herself in the midst of the cultural revolution the Beats had created. Minor Characters portrays the turbulent years of her relationship with Kerouac with extraordinary wit and love and a cool, critical eye, introducing the reader to a lesser known but purely original American voice: her own.

    For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia. Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking—rape, torture, deprivation—until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind.Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls. She has orchestrated raids on brothels and rescued sex workers, some as young as five and six; she has built shelters, started schools, and founded an organization that has so far saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. Her memoir will leave you awestruck by her tenacity and courage and will renew your faith in the power of an individual to bring about change.

    Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.   For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?   These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on countless interviews with mental health experts.   Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother’s Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the recent Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent.  All author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues.

    The details of her cruelty were so sickening they shocked the country. Alloma Gilbert was one of Spry's young victims, left at her mercy for 11 brutal years. This is her story.

    His journals reveal an artist who loved music, who knew the history of rock, and who was determined to define his place in that history. Here is a mesmerizing, incomparable portrait of the most influential musician of his time.

    The result is an explosive book that takes us, for the first time, deep inside a shadowy, fascinating, and surreal world of unscrupulous doctors, anything-goes team directors, and athletes so relentlessly driven to succeed that they would do anything—and take any risk, physical, mental, or moral—to gain the edge they need to win.Tyler Hamilton was once one of the world’s best-liked and top-ranked cyclists—a fierce competitor renowned among his peers for his uncanny endurance and epic tolerance for pain. In the 2003 Tour de France, he finished fourth despite breaking his collarbone in the early stages—and grinding eleven of his teeth down to the nerves along the way. He started his career with the U.S. Postal Service team in the 1990s and quickly rose to become Lance Armstrong’s most trusted lieutenant, and a member of his inner circle. For the first three of Armstrong’s record seven Tour de France victories, Hamilton was by Armstrong’s side, clearing his way. But just weeks after Hamilton reached his own personal pinnacle—winning the gold medal at the 2004 Olympics—his career came to a sudden, ignominious end: He was found guilty of doping and exiled from the sport.From the exhilaration of his early, naïve days in the peloton, Hamilton chronicles his ascent to the uppermost reaches of this unforgiving sport. In the mid-1990s, the advent of a powerful new blood-boosting drug called EPO reshaped the world of cycling, and a relentless, win-at-any-cost ethos took root. Its psychological toll would drive many of the sport’s top performers to substance abuse, depression, even suicide. For the first time ever, Hamilton recounts his own battle with clinical depression, speaks frankly about the agonizing choices that go along with the decision to compete at a world-class level, and tells the story of his complicated relationship with Lance Armstrong.A journey into the heart of a never-before-seen world, The Secret Race is a riveting, courageous act of witness from a man who is as determined to reveal the hard truth about his sport as he once was to win the Tour de France.

    With a slow chill that intensifies with each heart-pounding page, Rule describes her dawning awareness that Ted Bundy, her sensitive coworker on a crisis hotline, was one of the most prolific serial killers in America. He would confess to killing at least thirty-six young women from coast to coast, and was eventually executed for three of those cases. Drawing from their correspondence that endured until shortly before Bundy's death, and striking a seamless balance between her deeply personal perspective and her role as a crime reporter on the hunt for a savage serial killer -- the brilliant and charismatic Bundy, the man she thought she knew -- Rule changed the course of true-crime literature with this unforgettable chronicle.

    The case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine—and a total failure. As Nature Made Him tells the extraordinary story of David Reimer, who, when finally informed of his medical history, made the decision to live as a male. A macabre tale of medical arrogance, it is first and foremost a human drama of one man's—and one family's—amazing survival in the face of terrible odds.

    A young, highly intelligent man named Christian Longo, on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for killing his entire family, has recently been captured in Mexico, where he'd taken on a new identity -- Michael Finkel of the New York Times.The next day, on page A-3 of the Times, comes another bit of troubling news: a note, written by the paper's editors, explaining that Finkel has falsified parts of an investigative article and has been fired. This unlikely confluence sets the stage for a bizarre and intense relationship. After Longo's arrest, the only journalist the accused murderer will speak with is the real Michael Finkel. And as the months until Longo's trial tick away, the two men talk for dozens of hours on the telephone, meet in the jailhouse visiting room, and exchange nearly a thousand pages of handwritten letters.With Longo insisting he can prove his innocence, Finkel strives to uncover what really happened to Longo's family, and his quest becomes less a reporting job than a psychological cat-and-mouse game -- sometimes redemptively honest, other times slyly manipulative. Finkel's pursuit pays off only at the end, when Longo, after a lifetime of deception, finally says what he wouldn't even admit in court -- the whole, true story. Or so it seems.

    In 1985, Kristin Hersh was just starting to find her place in the world. After leaving home at the age of fifteen, the precocious child of unconventional hippies had enrolled in college while her band, Throwing Muses, was getting off the ground amid rumors of a major label deal. Then everything changed: she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and found herself in an emotional tailspin; she started medication, but then discovered she was pregnant. An intensely personal and moving account of that pivotal year, Rat Girl is sure to be greeted eagerly by Hersh's many fans.

    LGBT Studies. Lesbian. Queer. Child sexual abuse. Mothers. Parenting."A true story about Ellen's discovery that her daughters were being sexually abused by their father. There are no arrests, no happy endings and no one gets "healed". Instead, it's a painful account of how the children are harmed and how communities respond to such accusations. At a time when so much focus is on convictions and criminals, I found this a moving reminder that the reality of these situations is much more complex." (Ros Coward Observer)"Ellen Prescott writes with a literary flair that adds to the power of her story. She hits the reader in the gut on page 1: "In 1982, when my daughters were four and one, I decided to kill them . . . I was so in love with them, there at the door of their bedroom, that all I could think of was murder." You'd have to be anesthetized to put the book down at this point." (Toronto Star)"I recommend it to anyone, including most physicians who need a better understanding of human responses to suffering." (Willard Edwin Smith, BSc, MD, FRCP)"Well paced and … excruciatingly well written." (Quill and Quire)"This is a gripping story which I read from start to finish at one sitting." (Geist)"I liked Mondays are Yellow, Sundays are Grey so much that I bought a couple of copies for my office and they are rotating amongst my clients. I’m sure that it will be of tremendous help to both survivors and mothers of survivors." --Caren Durante, M.Ed."I was very impressed with the writer’s account and with her accomplishment of dealing with her own and her daughters’ abuse experiences. I appreciate your bringing this book to my attention." Dr. J. Adler, Registered Psychologist"I’m writing to tell you how much I admired and relished Mondays are Yellow, Sundays are Grey. I stayed in bed for 2 days and read it slowly. The story’s truth had my inner organs hiding behind each other, shifting all around. Having been abused as a kid myself, I was the victims; being a parent, I was the mother; being a man, I was the abuser. The critical me admired the smooth, unblinking text." –a reader"Thank you for writing about your experience. It helped me understand a lot about myself and my relationships to read about all of you. I have never read a personal account that so closely mirrored mine. I wish I had had a mother like you to hold me and comfort me and reassure me that not all life was pain. You’re a heck of a writer." –a reader'You'd tell me if Daddy touched your private parts, wouldn't you, Carolina?''No,' said Carolina firmly.'Why not, honey?''Because it's a secret.'It is only when long-buried memories from her own childhood start to surface that Ellen realises the terrible truth about her two young daughters: Carolina and Amy are being sexually abused by their father.Ellen writes with unflinching honesty about the heartbreak of finding out her daughters were abused, her fears of losing custody and her fight to have her story believed by sceptical doctors and social workers.A harrowing true story of sexual abuse from a mother's point of view, No More Hurt is a deeply affecting chronicle of Ellen's hard-won battle to create a place of safety and love for herself and her daughters.