The book follows the author's death-defying 200-mile journey in his antique Thomas Crapper bath - not just across the Channel, but around Kent - right up to the tremendous reception and huge media attention which awaited him under Tower Bridge. Tim met the Queen, and his bath now resides in the National Maritime Museum of Great Britain.

    Highly intelligent, athletic and a gifted musician, she was destined to excel in whichever field she chose to pursue. At the age of 16, Emily was diagnosed with Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF2) and less than a month later, she was in hospital and fighting for her life. Over the coming years, NF2 would steal her education, her smile, her hearing, her ability to walk. With her life plans in ruins, Emily struggled to find meaning and identity. Good things in her life weren't good any more. Because they were no longer there. With gentle humour and heart-breaking honesty, Emily shares her story. Slowly and painfully, she discovers value in new places, seeing the rainbows in the silence.

    What if you could convert everyday struggles, big and small, into the kind of fuel that spurs you past everyday normality to everyday greatness? This book is built upon a simple but powerful promise: anyone can use the ingredients of adversity to elevate one's business and life. Dr. Paul G. Stoltz is the world's leading expert on adversity-related research, theory, and applications. Erik Weihenmayer—a world-class mountain climber who happens to be blind—is Stoltz's Adversity Advantage personified. Their dream-team combination of wisdom and experience adds up to an application-packed program that shows listeners how to: —Rewire core response mechanisms to respond optimally to anything that happens the moment it strikes. —Move past coping with and managing adversity to harnessing adversity. —Pinpoint and grow Adversity Strengths—bring out the best under pressure.The Adversity Advantage blends proven leadership techniques with real-world anecdotes for a seven-step path to success.

    Directly in the ship’s path was the Sunshine Skyway Bridge--two ribbons of concrete, steel, and asphalt that crossed fifteen miles of open bay.  Suddenly, a violent weather cell reduced visibility to zero at the precise moment when Lerro attempted to direct the 20,000-ton vessel underneath the bridge. Unable to stop or see where he was going, Lerro drove the ship into a support pier; the main span splintered and collapsed 150 feet into the bay. Seven cars and a Greyhound bus fell over the broken edge and into the churning water below. Thirty-five people died.Skyway tells the entire story of this horrific event, from the circumstances that led up to it through the years-long legal proceedings that followed. Through personal interviews and extensive research, Bill DeYoung pieces together the harrowing moments of the collision, including the first-person accounts of witnesses and survivors. Among those whose lives were changed forever was Wesley MacIntire, the motorist whose truck ricocheted off the hull of the Summit Venture and sank. Although he was the lone survivor, MacIntire, like Lerro, was emotionally scarred and remained haunted by the tragedy for the rest of his life. Similarly, DeYoung details the downward spiral of Lerro’s life, his vilification in the days and weeks that followed the accident, and his obsession with the tragedy well into his painful last years. DeYoung also offers a history of the ill-fated bridge, from its construction in 1954, through the addition of a second parallel span in 1971, to its eventual replacement. He discusses the sinking of a Coast Guard cutter a mere three months before Skyway collapsed and the Department of Transportation’s dire warnings about the bridge’s condition. The result is a vividly detailed portrait of the rise and fall of a Florida landmark.

    It was as if her mother knew that Risé was not meant to be written into the family’s tragedies. In fact, from a young age Risé found a way to rise above the chaos, abuse, and molestation of her childhood, eventually escaping the weight of her family, and learning to love and believe in herself. This story is a testament to her deep determination and innate courage.

    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.

    In his darkest moments, when those dreams were dashed, he dug deep with the help of an unlikely friend—five-year-old Maddux Maple, a local hometown fan with leukemia. They made a pact: Cody would be in the UFC and win the championship, and Maddux would beat cancer. Read their moving story in Cody’s new book, The Pact, and go behind the scenes into Cody’s training and how he made his dreams come true. Cody Garbrandt grew up in a rough town in the Central Appalachian region of Ohio, surrounded by a longstanding culture of fighting—and drugs. Raised in this environment by a single mom (his dad left him at the young age of three to reside in the Ohio State Penitentiary), Cody grew up fighting, and he grew up wild. His future seemed predestined to end in the coal mines, or in prison.Thankfully, Cody had visions of something more. His American Dream? Mixed Martial Arts. But a path to success wasn’t clear. He spent as much time fighting in the streets as he did in the gym—one bad decision away from losing everything. Then, at age 20, Cody’s brother introduced him to five-year old Maddux Maple. Maddux was deathly ill with leukemia, his survival by no means assured. A unique friendship developed as they made a promise to each other: Maddux would beat cancer, and Cody would make it to the UFC and become world champion.Through five long years of pain and hardship, they both persevered; Cody, through the agony and sacrifices of fighting his way to the top, and Maddux through the horrors of chemotherapy. They loved and supported each other. They served as each other’s inspiration. And in December 2016, they made good on their pact: Cody won his UFC Championship belt, which he promptly presented to Maddux—the boy who had beaten cancer into remission.

    Riding rental bikes and carrying a bare minimum of supplies, Rob Cocuzzo and his sixty-fouryear-old father, Stephen, embark on a 425-mile ride from Florence to San Donato Val di Comino, an ancient village in the mountains outside of Rome from which the Cocuzzo family emigrated a hundred years earlier.Prompted by Rob's ailing grandfather, who regrets having never visited his home village, the two cyclists pledge to make the trip in the old man's honor. Despite an expired passport, getting lost, some near misses, and other misadventures, the father and son finally reach the quirky village of San Donato. For Italian Jews in the 1940s, the road to San Donato was one of exile, and many of the people in the village banded together to protect nearly a hundred Jews. While meeting his many new "cousins," Rob attempts to unlock this history and glean what role his family played at the time--resistors or collaborators? The Road to San Donato is a generational story that many Americans share and a travel adventure not to be missed.

    In the early hours of Thursday, August 8, 1963, at Sears Crossing near Cheddington in Buckinghamshire, £2.6 million (£45 million today) in unmarked £5, £1 and 10-shilling notes was stolen from the Glasgow to London mail train in a violent and daring raid which took forty-six minutes. Quickly dubbed "the Crime of the Century," it has captured the imagination of the public and the world's media for fifty years, taking its place in British folklore. Ronnie Biggs, Bruce Reynolds, and Buster Edwards became household names, and their accounts have fed the myths and legends of The Great Train Robbery. But what really happened? This definitive account dismantles the myths and strips away the sensational headlines to reveal a flawed, darker, and more complex story. The crime, the police investigation, the trial, two escapes from high-security prisons, and an establishment under siege are all laid bare in astonishing detail for an epic tale of crime and punishment. Fifty years later, here is the story set out in full for the first time—a true-life crime thriller, and also a vivid slice of British social history.

    Thompson’s Las Vegas, with the Good Doctor as tour guide. A Lord of the Rings-like adventure in the city’s underground flood channels. A seven-day stay at a seedy motel on East Fremont Street.The stories in My Week at the Blue Angel aren’t about Steve Wynn, Cirque du Soleil, or how to play poker and they aren’t set in Caesars Palace, XS Nightclub, or a 2,000-seat showroom. They’re about prostitutes, ex-cons, and the homeless and they’re set under Caesars Palace and in trailer parks and weekly motels.In this creative-nonfiction collection, Matthew O’Brien—author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas—and veteran photographer Bill Hughes show a side of the city rarely seen. A side beyond the neon lights, themed facades, and motel-room doors. A side beyond the barbwire fences, “No Trespassing” signs, and midnight shadows.A side of Las Vegas many locals and visitors are curious about, but few ever explore.

     It's meant to be a very easy read; not a book you read systematically from beginning to end but rather a book to read during those times you find reading a book overwhelming. How we choose to look at something is essential to our happiness, and the author, Dushka Zapata, hopes to leave readers with a little of that.

    Founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, it housed, fed and treated thousands of patients incapable of surviving on their own. The patient population in 1961 eclipsed 6,600, well above its listed capacity of 4,823, despite an operating budget that ranked forty-fifth out of the forty-eight states with such large public hospitals. By the mid-1990s, the patient population had fallen under 700, and the hospital had become a symbol of captivity, horror and chaos. Author William Buchheit details this history through the words and interviews of those who worked on the iconic campus.

    Now she turns her attention to Bali as she hilariously navigates life as an adopted Balinese local.A lot can happen when you set out to 'find yourself'. Sometimes, you can even lose the plot.From visiting ancient healers with cellphone addictions to leaving a shaking ashram intent on extracting her soul, Becky Wicks soon discovered that six months travelling round Bali wasn't all going to be about finding inner peace and harmony. In fact, the perils of possessed teens, eating raw, yogic headstands, diving shipwrecks and dicing with black magic and demons all took their toll on the Island of the Gods.And that was before the vaginal steaming.Becky Wicks lifts the sarong on real life in Bali in a blur of locals, tourists, expats and other other eating, praying lovers who arrive... you know... not really knowing who they are.

    Author Donna Moreau was the daughter of one such waiting wife, and here she writes of growing up at a time when The Flintstones were interrupted with news of firefights, fraggings, and protests, when the evening news announced death tolls along with the weather forecasts. The women and children of Schilling Manor fought on the emotional front of the war. It was not a front composed of battle plans and bullets. Their enemies were fear, loneliness, lack of information, and the slow tick of time. Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War tells the story of the last generation of hat-and-glove military wives called upon by their country to pack without question, to follow without comment, and to wait quietly with a smile. A heartfelt book that focuses on this other, hidden side of war, Waiting Wives is a narrative investigation of an extraordinary group of women. A compelling memoir and domestic drama, Waiting Wives is also the story of a country in the midst of change, of a country at war with a war.

    She's an upbeat Southerner with good hair and a successful business background, but she's had more heartache than most of us can imagine. Laughing Through the Ugly Cry is a collection of honest and sometimes raw stories. Dawn throws an arm around readers as she brings them along on her journey through the loss of a child, divorce, cancer, rape, the death of her only sibling, her husband's substance abuse, and finding her way back to Jesus in the middle of it all. Dawn shares her personal story to show readers how to find happiness and purpose even in the darkest of days. By laughing through the ugly cry, you will discover how to:Shut down negative feelings causing you to feel inadequateIdentify the pros despite how challenging the cons may seemEmbrace joy wherever you can find itLearn how to be honest with yourself and process grief in a healthy wayDawn writes, If more women were open about just how difficult our lives feel and how hard we are on ourselves, I think we'd learn to relax a little and give ourselves the grace God gives us every day. Laughing Through the Ugly Cry is great for:Women of any age seeking comfort, encouragement, and inspirationBook clubs and girls' nights--Dawn poses thoughtful group questions to support meaningful conversations about growth and joy