Sorrows are all pain otherwise, pain without sense or meaning. But joys, too, it seems to me, need their context. And sometimes their coexistence needs to be borne. The coexistence or possibility of the opposite can be what gives an experience its meaning. At its simplest, that is a story." --Camilla Gibb, This Is HappyIn this profoundly moving memoir, Camilla Gibb, the award-winning, bestselling author of Sweetness in the Belly and The Beauty of Humanity Movement, reveals the intensity of the grief that besieged her as the happiness of a longed for family shattered. Grief that lived in a potent mix with the solace that arose with the creation of another, most unexpected family. A family constituted by a small cast of resilient souls, adults broken in the way many of us are, united in love for a child. Reflecting on tangled moments of past sadness and joy, alienation and belonging, Gibb revisits her stories now in relation to the happy daughter who will inherit them, and she finds there new meaning and beauty. Raw and unflinching, intelligent and humane, This Is Happy asks the big questions and finds answers in the tender moments of the everyday.

    When he emerged he had under his arm a manuscript, a genre-smashing book about comedy, tragedy, love, loss, war, and redemption. When asked if this was the celebrity memoir, Norm replied, "Call it anything you damn like."

    If your train is late, it is typical. If there are no seats on the upper deck of a bus, it is typical. If it starts to rain at five o'clock just before you leave work, it is typical.''The English do not like to be wished "Have a nice day", because to them it sounds like a command. They think, Who the hell do you think you are to order me to have a nice day?' Ten years ago, Angela Kiss arrived in the UK without a word of English. All she brought with her was a small bag, a sense of adventure, a desire to work and a copy of George Mikes' classic 1940s' humour book about the peculiarities of the British, How to be an Alien.Through every dodgy flat share, low-paid waitressing job, awkward date and office mishap, Angela held tight to George's wit and wisdom. With his help she began to understand how to live amongst the English - with their eccentricity, spirit and singing train drivers - and fell in love with a land rich in green spaces, pubs and puddings. A wry, often affectionate view on the English, and how to navigate our national personality.

    Matters of Life and Death collects Picard's most compelling columns, covering a broad range of topics including Canada's right-to-die law, the true risks of the Zika virus, the financial challenges of a publicly funded health system, appalling health conditions in First Nations communities, the legalization of marijuana, the social and economic impacts of mental illness, and the healthcare challenges facing transgender people.The topic of health touches on the heart of society, intersecting with many aspects of private and public life—human rights, aging, political debate, economics and death. With his reporting, Picard demonstrates the connection between physical health and the health of society as a whole, provides the facts to help readers make knowledgeable health choices, and acts as a devoted advocate for those whose circumstances bar them from receiving the care they need.Providing an antidote to widespread fear-mongering and misinformation, Matters of Life and Death is essential reading for anyone with an investment in public health topics—in other words, everyone.

     Who’d be a copper? follows Jonathan Nicholas in his transition from a long-haired world traveller to becoming one of ‘Thatcher’s army’ on the picket lines of the 1984 miner’s dispute and beyond. His first years in the police were often chaotic and difficult, and he was very nearly sacked for not prosecuting enough people. Working at the sharp end of inner-city policing for the entire thirty years, Jonathan saw how politics interfered with the job; from the massaging of crime figures to personal petty squabbles with senior officers. His last ten years were the oddest, from being the best cop in the force to repeatedly being told that he faced dismissal. This astonishing true story comes from deep in the heart of British inner-city policing and is a revealing insight into what life is really like for a police officer, amid increasing budget cuts, bizarre Home Office ideas and stifling political correctness. “I can write what I like, even if it brings the police service into disrepute, because I don’t work for them anymore!” says Jonathan Nicholas. Who’d be a copper? is a unique insight into modern policing that will appeal to fans of autobiographies, plus those interested in seeing what really happens behind the scenes of the UK police."I HAVE BOUGHT YOUR BOOK."  TW,  Sir Thomas Winsor, WS HMCIC"A WEALTH OF ANECDOTES. FASCINATING." John Donoghue, author of 'Police, Crime & 999'"AN ILLUMINATING ACCOUNT OF LIFE AS A FRONT LINE OFFICER IN BRITAIN'S POLICE, A SERVICE OFTEN STRETCHED FOR RESOURCES BUT MIRED IN RED TAPE AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS."  Pat Condell, author of 'Freedom is My Religion'

    Hitchins doesn’t shy away from his failures or celebrate his mild successes — he sacrifices them for an audience’s amusement. He roasts his younger self, the effeminate ginger-haired kid with a competitive streak. The ups and downs of being a sperm donor to a lesbian couple. Then the fiery redhead professes his love for actress Shelley Long, declares his hatred of musical theatre, and recounts a summer spent in Provincetown working as a drag queen.Nothing is sacred. His first major break-up, how his mother plotted the murder of the family cat, his difficult relationship with his father, becoming an unintentional spokesperson for all redheads, and mandy moore many more.Blunt, awkward, emotional, ribald, this anthology of humiliation culminates in a greater understanding of love, work, and family. Like the final scene in a Murder She Wrote episode, A Brief History of Oversharing promises everyone the A-ha! moment Oprah tells us to experience. Paired with bourbon, Scottish wool, and Humpty Dumpty Party Mix, this journey is best read through a lens of schadenfreude.

    She’s a radical, self-styled hippie, and he is New York’s famous district attorney, a legal luminary of the establishment; she’s a prizewinning New York Times journalist who has chained herself to fences, bloodied draft files, and otherwise broken the law for her beliefs, and he is a secret iconoclast who could have put her in jail.     Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me is the memoir of their triumph against the odds, their ongoing thirty-five-year marriage, a union between two people so deeply in love but so different—and with so many decades separating them—that their family and friends fought to keep them apart.     Franks offers a confidential tour of their marriage, as well as the never-revealed, behind-the-scenes details of Morgenthau’s famous cases. We see a red-faced Ronald Lauder storm into Morgenthau’s office after the DA seizes a priceless Egon Schiele painting from the walls of the Museum of Modern Art; we witness the CIA dismissing Morgenthau’s discovery of the growing terrorist cell in New York that would become al-Qaeda headquarters. This is an unusually close look at the privates lives of two well-known people who have always refused to reveal themselves to the public.

    There’s Chan Sam, who left an "at home" wife in China to earn a living in "Gold Mountain"—North America. There’s May-ying, the wilful, seventeen-year-old concubine he bought, sight unseen, who labored in tea houses of west coast Chinatowns to support the family he would have in Canada, and the one he had in China. It was the concubine’s third daughter, the author’s mother, who unlocked the past for her daughter, whose curiosity about some old photographs ultimately reunited a family divided for most of the last century.

    During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield's success-and survival-is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst-and enjoy every moment of it. In An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, Col. Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible. Through eye-opening, entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks, and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement-and happiness. His own extraordinary education in space has taught him some counterintuitive lessons: don't visualize success, do care what others think, and always sweat the small stuff. You might never be able to build a robot, pilot a spacecraft, make a music video or perform basic surgery in zero gravity like Col. Hadfield. But his vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth-especially your own.

    That is, until she could no longer ignore her extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, and crushing chest pains. When the results came in, it was time to face the music: Tilda required immediate open-heart surgery to replace a defective valve and to repair damage done to this vital organ.  Tilda’s story takes readers from the diagnosis through all her fears and concerns, the or, her stay in the icu, the cardiac ward, recovery at home, rehabilitation, and ultimately, her return to work in the hospital armed with new insights on the patient’s perspective. She learned more in her week-long stay as a patient than in all her years caring for the critically ill, especially about trust and working in partnership with her caregivers. In Opening My Heart, Shalof expertly weaves recollections from her career and accounts of other nurses’ experiences into her own story, creating the perfect marriage between fascinating clinical detail and a personal journey of healing. Throughout it all is Shalof’s warm, friendly voice and humorous outlook. Nurses everywhere and anyone who’s ever been a hospital patient, or who is currently hospitalized or who might be one day (and those who love them!), will be empowered, enlightened, comforted, and entertained by this book.

    With wit, self-deprecation, and the input of experts from around the world, he provides critical information on nutrition and hydration, selecting shoes, race strategy, pacing, proper form, motivation, and how to stave off injuries while continually crossing new finish lines. He shares running music recommendations provided personally by a variety of pop and rock stars, including Paul Simon, Justin Bieber, The Black Keys, Ghostface Killah, Willie Nelson, Feist, and Norah Jones. Kaplan's infectious enthusiasm about running — and music — inspires the most recalcitrant runners to lace up their shoes and hit the pavement.

    No matter what a woman achieves in her life, no matter how old she gets or whether or not she herself becomes a mother, she is always and forever a daughter. The Women Whose Stories Are Included . . .Patti Davis                    Anne RiceCarolyn See                  Marg HelgenbergerMelissa Gilbert              Carnie WilsonRosanna Arquette         Mariel HemingwayAnna Quindlen              Angelica HustonMary Kay Place            Ruby DeeFaye Wattleton              Julianne MarguliesLily Tomlin                    Diahann CarrollCandice Bergen             Marianne WilliamsonLorna Luft                    Whoopie GoldbergAlice Hoffman              Cokie RobertsKathy SmithLinda Bloodworth Thomason

    And, of course, one day it ended.” —Sharon Butala In the tradition of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End, and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal comes a revelatory new book from one of our beloved writers. When Sharon Butala’s husband, Peter, died unexpectedly, she found herself with no place to call home. Torn by grief and loss, she fled the ranchlands of southwest Saskatchewan and moved to the city, leaving almost everything behind. A lifetime of possessions was reduced to a few boxes of books, clothes, and keepsakes. But a lifetime of experience went with her, and a limitless well of memory—of personal failures, of a marriage that everybody said would not last but did, of the unbreakable bonds of family. Reinventing herself in an urban landscape was painful, and facing her new life as a widow tested her very being. Yet out of this hard-won new existence comes an astonishingly frank, compassionate and moving memoir that offers not only solace and hope but inspiration to those who endure profound loss. Often called one of this country’s true visionaries, Sharon Butala shares her insights into the grieving process and reveals the small triumphs and funny moments that kept her going. Where I Live Now is profound in its understanding of the many homes women must build for themselves in a lifetime.