This work is a collection of 50 of Monty's best columns, that will provide a practical guide and a poetic record of the garden's changing seasons.

    In The Answer Is Never, skating journalist Jocko Weyland tells the rambunctious story of a rebellious sport that began as a wintertime surfing substitute on the streets of Southern California beach towns more than forty years ago and has evolved over the decades to become a fixture of urban youth culture around the world. Merging the historical development of the sport with passages about his own skating adventures in such wide-ranging places as Hawaii, Germany, and Cameroon, Weyland gives a fully realized portrait of a subculture whose love of free-flowing creativity and a distinctive antiauthoritarian worldview has inspired major trends in fashion, music, art, and film. Along the way, Weyland interweaves the stories of skating pioneers like Gregg Weaver and the Dogtown Z-Boys and living legends like Steve Caballero and Tony Hawk. He also charts the course of innovations in deck, truck, and wheel design to show how the changing boards changed the sport itself, enabling new tricks as skaters moved from the freestyle techniques that dominated the early days to the extreme street-skating style of today. Vivid and vibrant, The Answer Is Never is a fascinating book as radical and unique as the sport it chronicles.

    In the style of his first book, Andy recalls each event from the detailed documentation recorded at the time, each account written in a way that puts the reader right there next to him so that you live the events in real-time, hear the dialogue between paramedics, patient, their loved ones and other healthcare professionals as it would have been, and share in Andy’s thought processes during each of the ten very different situations he encounters.The term ‘The Dark Side’ describes the frontline emergency aspect of the Ambulance Service, since paramedics frequently experience sombre situations. In ‘The Dark Side, Part 2’ you will share in some truly traumatic, tragic and tearful events involving a seemingly vibrant, healthy young patient, a prison inmate, the victims of an horrific car crash, heart attacks, a frightening epileptic fit, the alarming effects of an allergic reaction, and what can happen when under-strain doctors prescribe the wrong medication. But there’s still room for lighthearted moments and a taste of the sometimes dark humour that allows paramedics to continually deal with events most of us would find too horrific. The detail in the descriptions of the care given to each patient on-scene by Andy and his colleagues will have you marvelling at the ability of these healthcare professionals to work at such speed of thought, buying enough time to deliver a patient into the specialist hands of hospital care and often full recovery. Of course there are inevitably also those times when tears of hope turn to tears of despair for loved ones. You cannot feel that pain until it happens to you, but this book will bring you mighty close to it at times.

    Brutally Honest is an exposé of the struggles and acute pain that lay behind the glamour and success. With deep personal insight, remarkable frankness and trademark Yorkshire humour, the book removes the mask of fame and reveals the true story behind the Spice Girls, as well as the horror of her most recent marriage and her 10 year struggle to be free.

    His plan began when he adopted Maude’s mother and indoctrinated her with his esoteric ideals. Her mission was to give him a daughter as blonde as she was, and then to take charge of the child’s education. That child was Maude, on whom her father conducted his outrageous experiment—to raise the perfect ‘super-human’ being.The three lived in an isolated mansion in northern France, where her father made her undergo endless horrifying endurance tests. Maude had to hold an electric fence without flinching. Her parents locked her in a cellar overnight and ordered her to sit still on a stool in the dark, contemplating death, while rats scurried around her feet.How did this girl, with her loveless and lonely childhood, emerge so unscathed, so full of the empathy that was absent in her childhood? How did she manage to escape?Maude was sustained by her love of nature and animals and her passion for literature. In writing this memoir, Maude Julien shows that it is possible to overcome severe trauma. She recounts her chilling and deeply moving story in a compelling and compassionate voice.

    

    Curator of kitsch and unabashed aficionada of pop culture, Halliday offers bemused, self-deprecating narration of events from guerrilla theater in Romania to drug-induced Apocalypse Now reenactments in Vietnam to a perhaps more surreal collagen-implant demonstration at a Paris fashion show emceed by Lauren Bacall. On layover in Amsterdam, Halliday finds unlikely trouble in the red-light districteliciting the ire of a tiny, violent madam, and is forced to explain tampons to soldiers in Kashmir"they re for ladies. Bleeding ladies"that, she admits, "might have looked like white cotton bullets lined up in their box." A self-admittedly bumbling vacationer, Halliday shareswith razor-sharp wit and to hilarious effectthe travel stories most are too self-conscious to tell. Includes line drawings by the author."

    Now Alan Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances."My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six," begins Alda's irresistible story. The son of a popular actor and a loving but mentally ill mother, he spent his early childhood backstage in the erotic and comic world of burlesque and went on, after early struggles, to achieve extraordinary success in his profession.Yet Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is not a memoir of show-business ups and downs. It is a moving and funny story of a boy growing into a man who then realizes he has only just begun to grow.It is the story of turning points in Alda's life, events that would make him what he is-if only he could survive them.From the moment as a boy when his dead dog is returned from the taxidermist's shop with a hideous expression on his face, and he learns that death can't be undone, to the decades-long effort to find compassion for the mother he lived with but never knew, to his acceptance of his father, both personally and professionally, Alda learns the hard way that change, uncertainty, and transformation are what life is made of, and true happiness is found in embracing them.Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, filled with curiosity about nature, good humor, and honesty, is the crowning achievement of an actor, author, and director, but surprisingly, it is the story of a life more filled with turbulence and laughter than any Alda has ever played on the stage or screen.

    Louis. For most of his life, he was an all-around normal kid. He excelled in sports and academics, and cherished his time at home with his family. It wasn't until he turned fifteen that things went seriously wrong. While attending his first high school party, he was introduced to pot and alcohol. Needless to say, he gave in to the pressure. A month after that, he discovered heroin. The drug had just made its way into the suburban party scene, and Jude was sure that he could get away with doing it only once. He was sadly mistaken. Within a few short months, his entire life was in shambles.In a series of events that leaves you grasping for the next page, Jude spares no amount of detail in his account of his near-decade long struggle with drug addiction, and the horrors he witnessed along the way.

    From the day they met, they’d been talking about “travelling more”, but in ten years they hadn’t advanced very far toward that dream and it had become more of a nagging dissatisfaction than an inspiring goal. Every time they returned from one of their brief yearly vacations, Joyce would spend weeks depressed, thinking there had to be a way to do more than this. They gradually came to the somewhat obvious realization that “travelling more” wasn’t just going to happen, they would need to decide what exactly they wanted, make a plan and commit to a lot of work. In early 2012, they made a decision to go all in on their travel dream, sell everything, and hit the road for an open-ended period of time.On March 31, 2013, they locked up their house one last time and left on a tour that would take them to 23 countries and 23 U.S. states over the next 14 months. This book is the chronicle of the first six months, spent in Central America and Africa, as they learned to slow down, look around and embrace wherever the heck they were. Alternately funny, frustrating and inspiring, their journey proves that anyone can travel more and that you don’t have to be rich, young or all that brave to get out and see the world.

     Author Paul Teutul, Jr., is arguably the most creative builder of custom "chopper" motorcycles in the world. His talents were revealed to millions of TV viewers worldwide on American Chopper, as well as later on a spinoff series, American Chopper Senior vs Junior. The Build gives the reader at Paul Jr.'s life behind the camera, which included volcanic conflict with his father and business mentor, Paul Sr. Using his own story of improbable success as an illustration, Paul Jr. offers insights on how anyone can find and activate often hidden talents. In a charming, often humorous way, The Build is a rallying cry to unleash God-designed creativity and live life to the fullest.

    

    She grew up Black and weird, before weird was cool, in a mostly white neighborhood in upstate New York, which created its own identity crises. Under the eye-rolling, foul-mouthed, loving tutelage of her unapologetic grandmother--and the horror movies she obsessively watched--Danielle grew into a tall, awkward, Sassy-loving teenager who wore black eyeliner as lipstick and was struggling with the aftermath of her mother's choices. But she also learned that she had the strength and smarts to save herself: her grandmother gifting her a faith in her own capabilities that the world would not have most Black girls believe.

    No internet or smartphones, video games or HDTV -- nothing but time to kill and the endless potential of a summer day. Only parental threats and a newly-developed sense of right and wrong could steer Johnny Virgil and his two younger brothers away from trouble...or directly into it. Join Johnny on this hilarious and irreverent romp through his childhood as he recounts the stories that made him what he is today - an unimportant cog in a vast, corporate financial services machine. But he wasn't always this way, and this book is proof. Booby traps, severed deer legs, runaway bulldozers, young love and fresh cow pies -- all this and more, brought to life by Johnny's sometimes twisted, sometimes touching but always hilarious tales of suburban childhood. If you have kids of your own, these are the stories you don't want them to read. If you like to laugh even when it's wrong and long to return to a more innocent yet treacherous time, this book will leave you wishing Johnny's childhood had never ended. ************* Important Note: This book is not intended for young readers. It does contain some profanity and adult situations and may not be suitable for all audiences.

    A modern day fairy tale of New York, Your Voice in My Head is a dazzling and devastating memoir, clear-eyed and shot through with wit. In a voice unlike any other, Emma Forrest explores depression and mania, but also the beauty of love—and the heartbreak of loss.