When Gary Linderer reached Vietnam in 1968, he volunteered for training and duty with the F Company 58th In, the Long Range Patrol Company that was "the Eyes of the Eagle." F Company pulled reconnaisssance missions and ambushes, and Linderer recounts night insertions into enemy territory, patrols against NVA antiaircraft emplacements, and some of the bravest demonstrations of courage under fire that has ever been described....From the Paperback edition.

    But when mortal danger came, it was from an unexpected direction.At the pinnacle of his career, a broken back and failed surgery left Willis permanently disabled and condemned to life in a body brace. Then came a diagnosis of terminal, stage IV throat cancer from exposure to depleted uranium on the battlefield.At his 50th birthday party, friends gathered around Willis, who was crippled, mute, muddled on narcotic medications, depressed, and dying. It was only halfway through the celebration that Willis realized the party's true purpose—his friends were there to say a final goodbye.Everyone knew Willis was on his way out … everyone except his 2-year-old son, who one day tearfully urged, "Get up, Daddy!” Willis desperately wanted to "get up,” but with so much stacked against him, he felt helpless and lost.His son’s words ringing in his ears and tugging at his heart, Willis ultimately chose to abandon the Western medicine that had failed him and embrace the most ancient and esoteric practices of Yoga, becoming a warrior for self-healing and personal transformation. As a symbol of his journey, he took the spiritual name, Bhava Ram, which stands for �Living from the Heart.” His cancer gone and his body fully restored, Bhava Ram demonstrates not only the power of non-Western medicine to heal the body, mind and the soul, but the capacity within us all to take charge of our lives and overcome even the greatest of obstacles.Warrior Pose is an unforgettable story about the power of love between father and son, a memoir from the front lines of the most momentous events of our times, a transformational journey of self-healing, and an inspiration to all who seek inner peace and wholeness.

    Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born. Yona's son Ariel grew up in Los Angeles, where Yona had become an esteemed professor, dedicating his career to preserving his people’s traditions. Ariel wanted nothing to do with his father’s strange immigrant heritage—until he had a son of his own.Ariel Sabar brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, discovering his family’s place in the sweeping saga of Middle-Eastern history. This powerful book is an improbable story of tolerance and hope set in what today is the very center of the world’s attention.

    Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

    I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That's who I am.He became famous through his academy award-winning performance as Dith Pran in the film The Killing Fields, but the key to Haing Ngor's screen success was the terrible truth of his own experiences in the rice paddies and labour camps of revolutionary Cambodia.Here, in a gripping memoir of life under the communist Khmer Rouge regime, he reveals the country's descent into a hell beyond our imaginings: a world of war slaves and senseless brutality, where family life simply ceases to be. But with the pain he also gives us hope and an illuminating example of how the best sort of love can actually be strengthened through the shared experience of a life-threatening ordeal. An eyewitness account of the real killing fields by an extraordinary survivor, this book is both a reminder of the horrors of war and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

    He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters. He was one of only thirty from the transport to survive. His gripping story is one of the most powerful and insightful descriptions of living and thriving with blindness, or indeed any challenge, ever published.* Chosen as one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century by a jury of writers including Harold Kushner, Thomas Moore, Huston Smith, and Natalie Goldberg* This fourth edition includes a new insert of photographs“One of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever encountered...[Lusseyran’s] experience is thrilling, horrible, honest, spiritually profound, and utterly full of joy.”— Ethan Hawke, in the Village Voice

    Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

    His entire family came close to losing their lives on the sea as they escaped from war-torn Vietnam in an overcrowded boat. But nothing - not murderous pirates, nor the imminent threat of death by hunger, disease or dehydration as they drifted for days - could quench their desire to make a better life in the country they had dreamed about. Life in Australia was hard, an endless succession of back-breaking work, crowded rooms, ruthless landlords and make-do everything. But there was a loving extended family, and always friends and play and something to laugh about for Anh, his brother Khoa and their sister Tram. Things got harder when their father left home when Anh was only nine - they felt his loss very deeply and their mother struggled to support the family on her own. His mother's sacrifice was an inspiration to Anh and he worked hard during his teenage years to help her make ends meet, also managing to graduate high school and then university. Another inspiration was the comedian Anh met when he was about to sign on for a 60-hour a week corporate job. Anh asked how many hours he worked. 'Four,' the answer came back, and that was it. He was going to be a comedian! The Happiest Refugee tells the incredible, uplifting and inspiring life story of one of our favourite personalities. Tragedy, humour, heartache and unswerving determination - a big life with big dreams. Anh's story will move and amuse all who read it. - Happiest Refugee: My Journey From Tragedy To Comedy By Anh Do (Paperback)

    It is the smells, the sounds, the fears and the petty triumphs in the world of the street pimp.

    Rose escaped into the world of her mind, something she had done as a child, and into high-profile relationships. Every detail of her personal life became public, and the realities of an inherently sexist industry emerged with every script, role, public appearance, and magazine cover. The Hollywood machine packaged her as a sexualized bombshell, hijacking her image and identity and marketing them for profit.Hollywood expected Rose to be silent and cooperative and to stay the path. Instead, she rebelled and asserted her true identity and voice. She reemerged unscripted, courageous, victorious, angry, smart, fierce, unapologetic, controversial, and real as f*ck.

    The more remote and inaccessible the beyul, the vaster its reputed qualities. Ancient Tibetan prophecies declare that the greatest of all hidden lands lies at the heart of the forbidding Tsangpo Gorge, deep in the Himalayas and veiled by a colossal waterfall. Nineteenth-century accounts of this fabled waterfall inspired a series of ill-fated European expeditions that ended prematurely in 1925 when the intrepid British plant collector Frank Kingdon-Ward penetrated all but a five-mile section of the Tsangpo's innermost gorge and declared that the falls were no more than a "religious myth" and a "romance of geography." The heart of the Tsangpo Gorge remained a blank spot on the map of world exploration until world-class climber and Buddhist scholar Ian Baker delved into the legends. Whatever cryptic Tibetan scrolls or past explorers had said about the Tsangpo's innermost gorge, Baker determined, could be verified only by exploring the uncharted five-mile gap. After several years of encountering sheer cliffs, maelstroms of impassable white water, and dense leech-infested jungles, on the last of a series of extraordinary expeditions, Baker and his National Geographic-sponsored team reached the depths of the Tsangpo Gorge. They made news worldwide by finding there a 108-foot-high waterfall, the legendary grail of Western explorers and Tibetan seekers alike. "The Heart of the World" is one of the most captivating stories of exploration and discovery in recent memory-an extraordinary journey to one of the wildest and most inaccessible places on earth and a pilgrimage to the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist faith.

    But when Yancey was in college, he uncovered a shocking secret about his father's death--a secret that began to illuminate the motivations that drove his mother to extreme, often hostile religious convictions and a belief that her sons had been ordained for a divine cause.Searching for answers, Yancey dives into his family origins, taking us on an evocative journey from the backwoods of the Bible Belt to the bustling streets of Philadelphia; from trailer parks to church sanctuaries; from family oddballs to fire-and-brimstone preachers and childhood awakenings through nature, music, and literature. In time, the weight of religious and family pressure sent both sons on opposite paths--one toward healing from the impact of what he calls a "toxic faith," the other into a self-destructive spiral.Where the Light Fell is a gripping family narrative set against a turbulent time in post-World War II America, shaped by the collision of Southern fundamentalism with the mounting pressures of the civil rights movement and Sixties-era forces of social change. In piecing together his fragmented personal history and his search for redemption, Yancey gives testament to the enduring power of our hunger for truth and the possibility of faith rooted in grace instead of fear."I truly believe this is the one book I was put on earth to write," says Yancey. "So many of the strands from my childhood—racial hostility, political division, culture wars—have resurfaced in modern form. Looking back points me forward."

    With candor, affection, and earthy wisdom, Larkin shares her experiences as a beginning and continuing Buddhist. This spirituality classic shows any seeker that it's possible to stumble, smile, and stay Zen through it all.

    When her father told her she was to spend a holiday with relatives in North Yemen, she jumped at the chance. Aged 15 and 13 respectively, Zana and her sister discovered that they had been literally sold into marriage, and that on their arrival they were virtually prisoners. They had to adapt to a completely alien way of life, with no running water, dung-plastered walls, frequent beatings, and the ordeal of childbirth on bare floors with only old women in attendance. After eight years of misery and humiliation Zana succeeded in escaping, but her sister is still there, and it seems likely that she will now never leave the country where she has spent more than half her life. This is an updated edition of Zana's account of her experiences.

    In November 1917 during low level bombing and strafing attacks, he was shot down three times by ground fire. He spent eight months at the front and accumulated 222 hours of flight time in Sopwith Pups and Camels during a staggering 118 patrols; being engaged in combat 56 times. He lived to retire from the RAF as an Air Vice-Marshal in 1946. Author of three books, this is by far his best. Lee puts you in the cockpit in a riveting account of life as a fighter pilot at the front. At turns humorous and dramatic, this thoughtful, enlightening, true account is a classic to be ranked with 'Winged Victory' by W. V. Yeates, also published by Grub Street.