From canoe camping next to unnamed lakes, to kayaking in Alaska’s pristine waters, she describes her many encounters with the bears, moose and other animals that make this wilderness their home. With her partner David she helped to build a cabin on a remote piece of property, off the grid and accessible only by boat. Illustrated with the photos she took along the way, her story is sometimes comic, and sometimes tragic, but throughout its pages she speaks with the voice of one who loves nature and the wilderness.

    

    Danza’s” showbiz credentials, and they immediately put him on the hot seat.   Featuring indelible portraits of students and teachers alike, I’d Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had reveals just how hard it is to keep today’s technologically savvy – and often alienated -- students engaged, how impressively committed most teachers are, and the outsized role counseling plays in a teacher’s day, given the psychological burdens many students carry.  The book also makes vivid how a modern high school works, showing Tony in a myriad of roles – from lecturing on To Kill a Mockingbird to “coaching” the football team to organizing a talent show to leading far-flung field trips to hosting teacher gripe sessions.  A surprisingly poignant account, I’d Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny but is mostly filled with hard-won wisdom and feel-good tears.

    His parents’ divorce set the stage for a downward spiral of self-destruction. The pressure he felt to keep his family together coupled with a deep desire to “fit in” fueled his experimentation with drugs and alcohol. His descent from upper-middle class teen with a promising future to the depths of heroin addiction left him bankrupt in every imaginable sense of the word. Soon, he was fully immersed in the dark underbelly of society and on the brink of death. Finding his way out of the abyss after ten years was neither quick nor easy. A twelve-step program of recovery and the practice of yoga provided the guiding lights toward a new path. Taylor does much more than share his story in A Way from Darkness; he invites the reader to find healing through community, Ashtanga yoga, and ultimately, acceptance.

    As the proprietor of the legendary Sea Tramp Tattoo Company, he’s inked gangbangers, age-defying moms, and sociopaths; he’s defused brawls, tended delicate egos, learned to spot and avoid bunnies, and made it his mission to perpetrate ingenious and awful practical jokes on his fellow Trojans. He’s a true swamp panther: He knows all the tricks of the trade and, more important, he knows how to keep his legendary shop in Portland, Oregon, from becoming the scene of a nightly bloodbath. In Tattoo Machine, Johnson lifts the curtain on an art form that has undergone rebirth and illuminates a world where art, drama, and commerce come together in highly entertaining theater. A tattoo shop is no longer a den of social outcasts and degenerates–it’s a workshop where committed and schooled artists who paint on living canvases develop close bonds and bitter rivalries, where tattoo legends and innovators are equally revered, and where the potential for disaster lurks in every corner. Discussing everything from his days as an apprentice to some of the greatest inkers in the trade to the incredibly vivid nightly spectacular over which he presides, Jeff Johnson has written a sometimes riotous, sometimes harrowing, and always riveting memoir about what it means to be on the front lines of a global art revolution.

    This one wouldn't quit for all the world.Meet Furious - sixteen, handsome and completely out of control. Nothing frightens him and no one can get through to him. Now meet Munchkin - a sweet kid with glasses who's an easy target and needs protecting. Then there's Seething and Deranged, two girls who are brimming with bad attitude; Fifty and Cent, who act like gangsters but are afraid of getting beaten up; and Stoic, a brilliant young mind struggling to survive. In the midst of them all, there is a bodyguard and bouncer, a counsellor and confidante, a young woman whose job it is to motivate and inspire them and somehow keep them out of trouble: their teacher. None will make it through the year unscathed. Some may not even make it at all...Spanning a year of shocking truths and hard-won victories, of fights and phone-thefts, teenage pregnancies and the dreaded OFSTED report, this is the remarkable diary of an inner-city school teacher. Revealing the extraordinary chaos, mismanagement and wrong-thinking that plague our education system, it is a funny, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking journey from the frontlines of the classroom to the heart of modern Britain.'The constant frustration, the struggle to hold on to your ideals in the face of a broken system - this book is the story of contemporary state education. It's both heart-breaking and inspiring' Toby Young'Everyone should read this book and do a bit of re-thinking. Straight from the chalk-face - a book which explains why our kids have been failed by State Education' Rod Liddle'The teacher who laid bare the chaos in the education systems. . . by delivering some brutal home truths. . . articulate and inspirational' Daily Mail'Charismatic. . . .electrifying. . . This remarkable woman has neatly identified the problem with education' The TimesKatharine Birbalsingh is Britain's most outspoken and controversial teacher. Educated at a comprehensive school, she earned a degree in philosophy and modern languages at Oxford university and has taught for over a decade in inner-city schools. To Miss with Love was for several years an anonymous blog that exposed the reality of inner-city schools and the problems with the education system. She now writes regularly for the Telegraph and has given evidence at the Commons select committee for education. Her views have sparked a national debate. www.katharinebirbalsingh.com

    He worked as a police reporter, racing the cops to robberies and shootings. He interviewed and wrote about mass murders and serial killers. He wrote dark, sexually graphic, and violent films like "Basic Instinct," "Jagged Edge," and "Jade."Eszterhas knew a lot about darkness. Then, on a hellishly hot day in 2001, desperately battling to survive throat cancer and his addictions to alcohol and cigarettes, Joe Eszterhas found God. Or God found him.And he came from darkness into light."Crossbearer" is the powerful, poignant, and sometimes wryly humorous account of a streetwise and cynical man's newfound faith, and of how he discovers God in the most intimate and routine moments of life: a family game of baseball, a child's photograph of a cloud, a dying mother's dying roses.It is also the inspiring story of a man who must overcome his addictions to stay alive--and can't by himself. He realizes that he needs the love of his wife, his children, and especially his new friend, God, to do it.Eszterhas is a master memoirist--his "Hollywood Animal "was called "powerful and affecting" ("The New York Times"), "absolutely first-rate" ("Los Angeles Times Book""Review") and "heartbreaking, funny and outrageous" ("Houston Chronicle")--and with "Crossbearer" he reveals a fresh and completely unexpected new chapter of his life. With surprising tenderness and a willingness to bare even weaknesses and mistakes, Joe Eszterhas has written a startling personal story about faith, values, family and love.

    No matter the trouble, they faced it with determination, camaraderie, and resourcefulness. In the midst of the Great Depression, despite record-breaking heat and crop failure, growing up on the family farm was nevertheless filled with bucolic pleasures.Farm Girl is Beuna "Bunny" Coburn Carlson's loving tribute to the gently rolling hills of western Wisconsin. With an inviting and fluid voice, she shares intimate moments of happinesses from her childhood: collecting butternuts for homemade maple candy, watching her father read by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp, and the joy of finding a juicy orange at the bottom of a Christmas stocking. Underlying each vignette is the courage of a strong family surviving adversity and finding comfort in one another. Hers is a memoir that readers can dip in and out of with pleasure.

    And yet, question marks have followed him around; question marks about his goalkeeping suitability after arriving on Merseyside; question marks about his integrity after match fixing allegations were laid against him. Here, Grobbelaar takes you to Africa, where nothing is at it seems; he takes you back to an era when Liverpool ruled Europe; he takes you to the benches of the Anfield dressing room, where only the strongest personalities survived. For the first time, he takes you inside the court room, detailing the draining fight to clear his name.

    Teacher LouAnne Johnson, the petite ex-Marine of Dangerous Minds, was their last chance. The boys, like handsome Latino Julio Escovar, expected to end up in jail. The girls, like regal, golden-skinned Simoa, often mysteriously disappeared. But not in LouAnne Johnson's class.Risking her life, and her heart, LouAnne cajoled, bribed, and loved these teens. She went out on tough urban streets to track down Simoa, she faced a dangerously angry father to get pretty, talented Araceli into art school, and she fought drug pushers, trouble-making dropouts, and burned-out teachers to leave her kids alone. Her goal was to get her kids to graduation. Her method? Believe in them...until they believed in themselves.

    And when little Tamala Georgette Jones was born in 1970, she was considered country music's heir apparent. For the first four years of her life, Georgette had two adoring parents who showed her off at every opportunity, and between her parents, grandparents, older sisters, and cheering fans, Georgette's feet seldom hit the ground. But as in every fairy tale, dark forces were just around the corner. Her parents fought, and George drank. George and Tammy divorced when Georgette was four, and it would be years before she understood just what that meant. "The Three of Us "is an honest and heartfelt look into the life of a broken family living in the glare of the public spotlight. Like so many of her generation, Georgette had to make sense of loving two parents who couldn't love each other. With never-before-told stories about George and Tammy, it recounts Tammy's descent into prescription pill addiction, her dependence on her fifth husband, George Richey, and her untimely death at the age of fifty-five. Georgette opens up about her broken relationship with her father and what it took for them to come back together. Lastly, Georgette discusses the ups and downs of her adult life: failed marriages, illness, an arrest, and now, an unexpected but thrilling career as a musician. "The Three of Us "is a story of both extreme privilege and great trials, of larger-than-life people with larger-than-life problems. Rich in country music history, it contains twists and turns, highs and lows, but in the end, it stands as an intensely moving tale of love, loss, heartbreak, and what it means to be a family.

    

    For thirty years, Diane Covington-Carter dreamed of living in France and immersing herself in the country and language that spoke to her heart and soul. At age fifty, she set off to fulfill that yearning. Journey along with her as she discovers missing pieces of her own personal puzzle that could only emerge in French. Most of all, Covington-Carter learned that a long cherished dream can become even more powerful from the waiting.

    With a child’s uncluttered eye, she describes the small details—shopping in the market, men waiting for work at the dock gates, the rituals of washday, and the sights, sounds, and smells of the old East End of London. She also describes the fear—of illness, of unemployment, of the workhouse—that hung over her family and thousands like them, and her determination that her own children would never know the kind of poverty she had experienced.

    Little did she know that as she followed him, he was plying his trade: conning people. Her family drove stolen cars, lived in stolen houses, and shopped with stolen credit cards. Drug use was regular, as were visits from strange people who were trying to track her father down. Though she eventually cut ties with her father, Candice could not ignore the scars that were left from her childhood.This is her story, one steeped in secrets but one that, ultimately, led her to a place of forgiveness and freedom. As she struggles to understand her criminal father, as well as her own imperfect life, Candice comes to realize that we are not defined by our circumstances but rather by how we react to those circumstances. She's found peace in the knowledge that God doesn't love us because we're perfect--but because he is.