Book picks similar to
Braving the World: Adventures in Travel and Retirement by Pam Saylor
giveaways
travel
non-fiction
england
Missing: True Cases of Mysterious Disappearances
Andrew J. Clark - 2018
disappeared without leaving a trace. This book shed lights on some of the most intriguing missing person cases.There are countless stories all over the globe of average, everyday people suddenly vanishing under the strangest and most inopportune of circumstances. These cases have baffled the experts and remained unsolved for decades. The missing person cases presented in this book have diverse backgrounds, but they are all equally mysterious. Here we will dive headfirst into some of the most unusual disappearing acts on record. Rational explanations have been put forward for some, but many lack any plausible theories whatsoever.This book relates the true yet astonishing tales of prime ministers lost at sea, esteemed physicists vanishing without a trace, great explorers lost in the wilderness. From the World War II veteran who seemed to literally disappear into thin air on a bus ride home, to the ill-fated singer-songwriter Connie Converse who right around her 50th birthday decided to pull a 'Bilbo Baggins' (Connie’s own words) on the ones she loved by slipping on her very own ring of invisibility and vanishing out of sight, this book takes us through some of the saddest, the most intriguing, and the most downright bizarre accounts of lost souls that you will ever find.
The Joy of Small Things
Hannah Jane Parkinson - 2021
Hannah Jane Parkinson is a specialist in savouring the small pleasures of life. She revels in her fluffy dressing gown ('like bathing in marshmallow'), finds calm in solo cinema trips, is charmed by the personalities of fonts ('you'll never see Comic Sans on a funeral notice'), celebrates pockets and gleefully abandons a book she isn't enjoying. Parkinson's everyday exaltations - selected from her immensely successful Guardian column - will utterly delight.Features brand-new material
The Lady Whose Mouth I Set on Fire: True Tales from the ER
Dr. McAnonymousDr. McAnonymous - 2021
They are first-hand accounts told by an old, tired physician who has survived three decades in this odd, but exciting world of life and death. They are heartwarming, heart-wrenching, hilarious or fascinating. This book is for anyone interested in the inner belly of the Human Being. There is much to be learned and felt here. Beware, this book is not for everyone, and you may begin laughing at inappropriate times—or even develop nightmares.
The DIRTY, LAZY, KETO 5-Ingredient Cookbook: 100 Easy-Peasy Recipes Low in Carbs, Big on Flavor
Stephanie Laska - 2021
After losing 140 pounds on the keto diet, bestselling author Stephanie Laska makes the keto diet more accessible and foolproof than ever before with these 100 delicious recipes made with only 5 (or fewer) main ingredients! The easy-going approach of The DIRTY, LAZY KETO 5-Ingredient Cookbook makes weight loss manageable, sustainable, and even fun. Packed with her trademark sass and practical advice, Stephanie teaches the proven fundamentals of dirty keto cooking in a way that gets you excited and motivated. You’ll find 100 easy, great-tasting classic recipes that the entire family will enjoy—even the pickiest eaters. Making the keto diet more convenient than ever, this is a flexible, honest, real-world approach to losing weight that anyone can accomplish. In this cookbook, you’ll find no judgment—just plenty of support to help you pursue your own unique path to sustainable healthy weight loss—not perfection. This is lazy keto at its finest!
Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
Cameron Conaway - 2011
It teaches the value of personal reflection, how life's most painful moments can lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of human nature, and just what is possible when optimism and determination combine to overcome tough odds. Caged shows how the pursuit of two seemingly disparate passions helped a struggling boy blossom into a simple man. The result is a literary and lyrical philosophical journey into the heart and mind of a modern-day warrior.
Every 9 Minutes
Christina Vitagliano - 2021
This honest coming of age memoir begins in the late '60s and spans 30 years, showing how others who've experienced childhood trauma can stay true to themselves and use their pain to build a promising future.
Brothers and Wives: Inside the Private Lives of William, Kate, Harry, and Meghan
Christopher Andersen - 2021
Now, twenty years later, Queen Elizabeth II is in her mid-nineties, Prince Charles is in his seventies, and all eyes are turned increasingly toward William and Harry again. Andersen picks up where he left off, covering everything that has happened to the brothers as they have grown up, gotten married to two remarkable women, and had children—all while facing continual waves of controversy and questions about the ways their relationship has shifted.Andersen examines how the Queen’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering to mold her grandsons in the Windsor image after Diana’s death, and her expectations of William as the future king, played out. He questions whether the brothers’ famously close relationship can survive Harry’s departure from the Royal Family—the first time this has happened since their great-great-uncle King Edward abdicated the throne to marry a divorcée. He delves into the impact sisters-in-law Kate and Meghan have had on each other as well as on their princes, and how marriage and fatherhood have changed the brothers and in some ways also driven a wedge between them. Andersen also looks with an honest eye at how the princes and their wives have been continuously buffeted by scandal—including headline-making allegations of bullying, racism, betrayal, and emotional abuse that pushed more than one royal to the brink of self-destruction.Based on in-depth research and with his “fascinating and insightful” (The Christian Science Monitor) writing, Christopher Andersen leaves no stone unturned in this intimate and riveting look into the private lives of the world’s most famous princes.
Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
Andrea Pitzer - 2021
In this engrossing narrative of the Far North, enriched by her own adventurous sojourns in the Arctic, Andrea Pitzer brings Barents' three harrowing expeditions to vivid life--while giving us fascinating insights into one of history's most intrepid navigators.
Pushups in the Prayer Room
Norm Schriever - 2012
Throughout his journeys he touches down in more than 20 countries in 6 continents, spanning 70,000 miles total, or the equivalent of almost three times around the equator. There is never a dull moment on this wild and irreverent adventure, whether Norm is evading armed carjackers in a high-speed chase in the barrios of Venezuela, exploring ancient wonders of the world like the pyramids, the Great Wall, and Machu Picchu, almost landing in Bolivian jail for mistakenly being accused of cocaine trafficking, or witnessing the holiest sites on earth in Jerusalem. Along the way, Norm encounters a broad spectrum of human existence and experiences a blossoming of consciousness and spiritual growth that he never anticipated. What started out as a wild, raucous party trip evolves into a man's quest for his life's purpose in the world. Pushups in the Prayer Room: A Year Backpacking around the World is an honest, no-holds-barred account of that year-long odyssey around the globe. Norm's writing, which is enlightening, gritty, filled with self-deprecating humor, yet always authentic, picks you up and carries you along on that crazy journey.
Above the Ether
Eric BarnesEric Barnes - 2019
John Mandel's Station Eleven and Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood.In this prequel to Eric Barnes's acclaimed cli-fi novel The City Where We Once Lived, six sets of characters move through a landscape and a country just beginning to show the signs of cataclysmic change.A father and his young children fleeing a tsunami after a massive earthquake in the Gulf. A woman and her husband punishing themselves without relent for the loss of both their sons to addiction, while wildfires slowly burn closer to their family home. A brilliant investor, assessing opportunity in the risk to crops, homes, cities, industries, and infrastructure, working in the silent comfort of her office sixty floors up in the scorching air. A doctor and his wife stuck in a refugee camp for immigrants somewhere in a southern desert. Two young men working the rides for a roadside carnival, one escaping a brutal past, the other a racist present. The manager of a chain of nondescript fast-food restaurants in a city ravaged by the relentless wind.While every night the news alternates images of tsunami destruction with the baseball scores, the characters converge on a city where the forces of change have already broken—a city half abandoned, with one part left to be scavenged as the levee system protecting it slowly fails—until, in their vehicles on the highway that runs through it, they witness the approach of what looks to be just one more violent storm.
The Essence of Nathan Biddle
J. William Lewis - 2021
Kit’s angst is compounded by a unique psychological burden he is forced to carry: his intelligent but unstable Uncle Nat has committed an unspeakable act on what, according to the Uncle’s deranged account, were direct orders from God.The tragedy haunting his family follows Kit like a dark and foreboding cloud, exacerbating his already compulsive struggle with existential questions about the meaning of his life. When the brilliant, perhaps phantasmic, Anna dismisses him, Kit quickly spirals into despair and self-destruction. But when his irrational decision to steal a maintenance truck and speed aimlessly down the highway ends in a horrific accident and months of both physical and emotional convalescence, Kit is forced to examine his perceptions of his life and his version of reality.In this exquisite bildungsroman, calamity leads to fresh perspectives and new perceptions: it focuses Kit’s mind and forces him to confront the issues that plague him. Readers will empathize—and celebrate—as the darkness lifts and Kit comes to terms with the necessity of engagement with life’s pain, pleasure . . . and absurdity.An intelligent, clever, and captivating tale, The Essence of Nathan Biddle soars in the spaces that exist between despair and hope, darkness and light, love and loss. Beautifully written, profoundly moving, and resplendent with characters destined to remain with you long after the last page is turned, The Essence of Nathan Biddle is unforgettable.
Beautiful Hero: How We Survived the Khmer Rouge
Jennifer H. Lau - 2016
Surrounded by unimaginable adverse forces, one strong woman would ultimately lead her entire family to survive. Beautiful Hero is an autobiographical narrative told from a daughter’s perspective. The story centers around Meiyeng, the eponymous Beautiful Hero, and her innate ability to sustain everyone in her family. She shepherded her entire family through starvation, diseases, slavery and massacres in war-torn Cambodia to forge a new life in America. Over two million people—a third of the country’s population—fell victim to a devastating genocide in Cambodia. The rise of the Khmer Rouge posed not merely a single challenge to survival, but rather a series of nightmarish obstacles that required constant circumvention, outmaneuvering, and exceptional fortitude from those few who would survive the regime intact. The story eerily unravels the layers of atrocity and evil unleashed upon the people, providing a clear view of this horrific and violent time of the Cambodian revolution.br>
War Ready: In My Father's Shadow
Mary Lou Darst - 2011
Her father served in the military, and she traveled the world with him and her family. His assignments took them to Alaska, Virginia, Japan, Texas, and Germany, as part of the US Army's responsibilities in policing the world. This candid memoir recounts her family's life in new places and cultures following World War II. What was it like to be a child living in Japan seven years after the war? What was it like to be a thirteen-year-old living in Germany twelve years after the war? What was it like to grow up moving between cultures? This is the story of one family bound to service in the military at a time when the world was being redefined. For a young girl, it was the adventure of a lifetime as she learned the secrets of finding her own way in that new world. The author's story was informed by reading her father's diary, which offers up intimate and candid insight into the life of a typical soldier in a time of war. His entries describe his time serving aboard a battleship built for 800 soldiers--but carrying 6,000 to war. His tales--told from the perspective of a young soldier in southern England, Wales, and Scotland from 1943 to 1945--are glimpses into a life many will never know firsthand.
Days of Hope, Miles of Misery: Love and Loss on the Oregon Trail
Fred Dickey - 2020
For five months, and two thousand miles, the wagon train lumbers toward California on the Oregon Trail and into big trouble. The emigrants endure disease, dirt, and attacks from outlaws, and invaded Indians. Bitter strife erupts between ill-matched pioneers forced together by necessity.The 1845 wagon train is part of a vast westward movement; a monument to Americana that fascinates readers 175 years later.In one of the wagons is a heart-sick physician, Hannah Blanc, whose tribulations are Jobian: the suicide of a beloved husband, unfair denial of her medical career by graybeards of the profession, and a nightmarish new "marriage of necessity to a vile man named Ed Spencer.The guide is a hard-to-figure mountain man, Nimrod Lee, who knows the trail, but is also looking a man he needs to kill. Guilt over the murder of his Crow wife beclouds his conscience. Betrayal of his word to her chief father threatens his life. The killer of his wife is still out there.A love affair between Hannah and Nimrod is inevitable, but it's complicated, because for both, painful histories and mixed-up emotions make tall walls. The heart of the story is the pool of misgivings that threatens to drown their tenuous affair.The wagon train is a village of strangers locked together with no escape.Beyond all they must endure, the pioneers keep fighting, and keep coming. Those who make it are survivors; survivors with a great story to tell.
Messiah
Anonymous - 2017
Messiah takes the reader on a new and unique journey through every book of the New Testament. Each part of Messiah begins with one of the Gospels, and together combine to provide the reader with enjoyable and impactful readings all centered on Jesus. The end result is a Bible developed for the purpose of being read and understood, not referred to. Messiah is a new way to interact with God’s Word.Messiah delivers Scripture to the reader as it was originally created: without chapter or verse breaks. While references are made available for ease of finding specific Scripture references, those references do not appear within the actual text of Scripture. This makes for uninterrupted reading of God’s Word. Created with the look and feel of a paperback book, and written using the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, the most readable translation available, Messiah enables you to easily read and understand the Bible.