He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history's most creative genius

    By the time he reached his 50th birthday his career was everything he'd ever hoped it would be. With a sports column in a major paper, winning APSE's Best Sports Columnist in Texas four times, and a daily spot on ESPN's highly successful show, "Around the Horn," Cowlishaw had pursued and conquered nearly everything he ever desired professionally. However, the pursuit of that success nearly cost him his life.DRUNK ON SPORTS is more than simply a memoir by one of America's most well-known sportswriters. Behind his happy-go-lucky public persona was a man with a considerable (but well-disguised) drinking problem. For years, Cowlishaw believed that his ability to drink with the best of them helped in his development of sources and pursuit of stories and, unfortunately, he was right. Among others, the relationship he built while sitting on a barstool next to Cowboys Coach Jimmy Johnson allowed him to get where other reporters couldn't. As all hell broke loose between Johnson and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in 1994, Cowlishaw was right next to Coach Johnson every step (and beer) along the way. In DRUNK ON SPORTS, Cowlishaw recounts first-hand stories never told and quotes never shared from the bizarre breakup of one of the NFL's most successful dynasties.As he points out in the introduction, this is not an anti-drinking book. Cowlishaw loved alcohol for 35 years. If anything, this is a how-not-to book more than a how-to book. Along the way, Cowlishaw takes readers inside some of the biggest stories in sports. He joined ESPN in 2002 as a regular on Around the Horn and discusses life behind the scenes at the Worldwide Leader candidly and at length. Cowlishaw writes and talks and, at times, drinks his way into the sports world's fast lane - what else would you call getting hammered on vodka with Denny Hamlin at the Daytona 500 - before realizing the only way to continue was to call a halt to the partying.The story of his rise and fall is more insightful and humorous than it is preachy as Cowlishaw examines some of the flawed decisions he made throughout his lifetime in sports. DRUNK ON SPORTS is a cautionary yet entertaining tale of never before told stories featuring some of the most recognizable personalities in sports, and if it causes some readers to reexamine their own lives, then it will have gone above and beyond its intended purpose.

    Some ten years later, an up-and-coming playwright, he was overcome by mania and delusions. Thus began a terrible period in which he was often suicidal, increasingly disconnected from family and friends, sometimes in trouble with the law, and homeless in London.Drawing on his own memories, the recollections of people who knew him when he was at his worst, and medical and police records, Arnold Thomas Fanning has produced a beautifully written, devastatingly intense account of madness - and recovery, to the point where he has not had any serious illness for over a decade and has become an acclaimed playwright. Fanning conveys the consciousness of a person living with mania, psychosis and severe depression with a startling precision and intimacy. Mind on Fire is the gripping, sometimes harrowing, and ultimately uplifting testament of a person who has visited hellish regions of the mind.

    However, over the following eight years, he exposed gross incompetence and corruption within An Garda Siochána. It ranged from a violent criminal being free to murder, to country-wide corruption in the policing of road safety.Along the way he paid a terrible price, enduring vilification, bullying and harassment by forces who wanted to silence him and his inconvenient truths. Worse still were the rumours of an extreme nature, which had a devastating effect on his whole family.McCabe's actions ultimately led to some of the biggest reforms of An Garda Siochána since the foundation of the state, caused major political upheaval, and culminated in a Tribunal established in 2017, to examine whether there had been a smear campaign against him within the force.A Force For Justice reveals the story behind the scenes, of one man struggling to survive in the most challenging of circumstances. It is a dramatic account of a garda sergeant's journey from a rural outpost into the heart of the Irish political and legal system.

    As the Iraq War draws to an official close, Joshuah Bearman tells the funny and poignant tale of the real-life Baghdad Country Club, a bar in the Green Zone during the conflict's bloodiest years. Against all odds, its proprietors struggle to keep their raucous watering hole safe and well-stocked as the insurgency rages outside.

     “You’ll like it,” she argued. “I know I’ll like it,” I said. “That’s why I’m not going to try it.” “Try it just this once and I’ll never ask you to do it again.” That was a deal. I slipped back into the driver’s seat while Pat corn-rowed two neat lines of the silky white powder on the back of a plastic cassette tape cover. Fifteen hundred dollars every month, an abusive boyfriend, a molested child, a lost family, hotels for houses, a ruined leg, a gun to my head, a knife to my butt, a jail cell all my own. Black eyes, bruised days, broken hours. Looking back, it seems strange what I gave up to get my roommate off my back. It only took four seconds. *** In her debut memoir, Andrade tells of her years with cocaine and crystal methamphetamines—using, then selling—until all she had left of the life she wanted was a chalk outline and a pack of cigarettes. This is the story of her use and recovery, of the people who frustrated and inspired her, of her decision to leave the drug world. It is the story of her slow, often unsteady walk home.

    “They’re just fantastic! Then I remembered, Ed you’re an anesthesiologist…f*cking hell! I can’t believe that…”.  I like to think I’m an inspiration to all budding doctors that anything is achievable.Ed is a sleepless anesthesiologist. His shifts involve snatching five-minute lunch breaks in the staff bathrooms, navigating emergencies and living with the all too terrifying sense of responsibility. And that was before Coronavirus arrived, which quickly turned his job into a nightmare queue of struggling with ill-fitting PPE, balancing staff shortages and intubating Covid-19 patients who can’t breathe on their own.Hilariously funny and moving, Catch Your Breath follows Ed’s journey from bewildered medical student in Aberdeen to unflinching anesthesiologist on the NHS frontline. It offers a unique insight into life on the hospital wards during the pandemic, while also sharing the hope that we will all get through this.

    In the decades since his death in September 1973, millions have read THE HOBBIT, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and THE SILMARILLION and become fascinated about the very private man behind the books. Born in South Africa in January 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was orphaned in childhood and brought up in near-poverty. He served in the first World War, surviving the Battle of the Somme, where he lost many of the closest friends he'd ever had. After the war he returned to the academic life, achieving high repute as a scholar and university teacher, eventually becoming Merton Professor of English at Oxford where he was a close friend of C.S. Lewis and the other writers known as The Inklings.Then suddenly his life changed dramatically. One day while grading essay papers he found himself writing 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' -- and worldwide renown awaited him. Humphrey Carpenter was given unrestricted access to all Tolkien's papers, and interviewed his friends and family. From these sources he follows the long and painful process of creation that produced THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE SILMARILLION and offers a wealth of information about the life and work of the twentieth century's most cherished author.

    That first year was the epitome of Raiders football-- the silver-and-black team of renegades steamrolled opponents and defeated the Washington Redskins in the Super Bowl. For nearly ten years, Huizenga lived in the real NFL trenches, a battlefield atmosphere where getting hurt and partying hard was the name of the game. Jam-packed with close-up anecdotes about football's warriors, this book reveals:* The mind games and methods of mysterious Raiders owner Al Davis* The truth about drug and steroid use in the NFL* The pressure on players to perform even when threatened by serious injury* Harrowing and hilarious true stories about the side of football fans never see* The wild life and tragic death of Lyle Alzado

    Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary. Split into four sections—"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"—Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays-some published here for the first time-on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani. In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers—E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others—have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences—in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond—that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected. Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.

    In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ni Ghriofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.

    2 cassettes.

    That is, until she found herself dumped, suddenly single, and mystifyingly...mostly attracted to dudes. Like any good comic, she was inspired to investigate, and thus ensued her hilarious, sometimes high-stakes personal research into the world of men, culminating in a beautiful, difficult romance. Featuring insightful interviews with comics and experts like W. Kamau Bell, Margaret Cho, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Kate’s dad and close friends, this exploration of modern masculinity delves into how to be a good guy and how to be in love with one...and when that isn’t quite enough.

    A Book of Migrations portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Enriched by cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, A Book of Migrations carves a new route through Ireland’s history, literature and landscape.

    It is a family story of war and love, and how the ghosts of the past return to shape the present.Wounds is a powerful memoir about Irish people who found themselves caught up in the revolution that followed the 1916 Rising, and in the pitiless violence of civil war in north Kerry after the British left in 1922.It is the story of Keane’s grandmother Hannah Purtill, her brother Mick and his friend Con Brosnan, and how they and their neighbours took up guns to fight the British Empire and create an independent Ireland. And it is the story of another Irishman, Tobias O’Sullivan, who fought against them as a policeman because he believed it was his duty to uphold the law of his country.Many thousands of people took part in the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. Whatever side they chose, all were changed in some way by the costs of violence. Keane uses the experiences of his ancestral homeland in north Kerry to examine why people will kill for a cause and how the act of killing reverberates through the generations.