In his new book, destined to be a classic, Patrick Bishop examines the high point of its existence – the Second World War, when the Air Force saved the nation from defeat then led the advance to victory.A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERAir warfare was a terrible novelty of the modern age, requiring a new military outlook. From the beginning, the RAF’s identity set it apart from the traditional services. It was innovative, flexible and comparatively meritocratic, advancing the quasi-revolutionary idea that competence was more important than background.The Air Force went into the war with inadequate machines, training and tactics, and the early phase was littered with setbacks and debacles. Then, in the summer of 1940, in full view of the population, Fighter Command won one of the decisive battles of the struggle. Thereafter the RAF was gilded with an aura of success that never tarnished, going on to make a vital contribution to Allied victory in all theatres.Drawing from diaries, letters, memoirs, and interviews, Air Force Blue captures the nature of combat in the skies over the corrugated wastes of the Atlantic, the sands of the Western Desert and the jungles of Burma. It also brings to life the intensely lived dramas, romances, friendships and fun that were as important a part of the experience as the fighting.Air Force Blue portrays the spirit of the RAF – its heart and soul – during its finest hours. It is essential reading for the millions in Britain and the Commonwealth whose loved ones served, and for anyone who wants to understand the Second World War.

    Includes over 100 recipes, divided into sections for ages 4 to 16, along with tips and helpful hints that emphasize safety and creativity. Fully illustrated with fun drawings, color photographs of kids in the kitchen with Rachael, and original letters from young fans. Impress your family with Smashed Potatoes and Cream Cheese, Green Noodles and Ham, Sloppy Turkey Joes, and Presto! Pasta and Pesto Salad. And don't forget dessert! There's Absolutely Fabulous 5-Minute Fudge, Fuji Apples and Peanutbuttery Caramel Dip, Tropical Yogurt Parfaits, and more.

    You're pregnant. Get used to the fact that life is never going to be the same. And break out the credit card, because that little bundle of joy is going to cost you. The list seems endless--from car seats to changing pads. But don't despair. The Girlfriends are here to take some of the guesswork out of shopping for baby-to-be. We'll tell you when to skimp and when to splurge, and which hand-me-downs are safe and which are sorry. You'll get advice on...Where to get what you needCrib and car seat do's and don'tsWardrobe musts and misses--for mother and childStocking the nursery and the rest of the houseWhat every new mom should have on hand for herselfThe Master Shopping List--don't leave home without it!Plus the Top 10 Things to Do for Yourself Before the Baby Arrives, the Top 10 Baby Items You Won't Find at a Baby Store, the Top 10 Best--and Worst--Things to Borrow, the Top 10 Signs of a First-Time Mom, and more...

    It was as if her mother knew that Risé was not meant to be written into the family’s tragedies. In fact, from a young age Risé found a way to rise above the chaos, abuse, and molestation of her childhood, eventually escaping the weight of her family, and learning to love and believe in herself. This story is a testament to her deep determination and innate courage.

    Her mother suggested, “Why don’t you look in Nana’s recipe folder?” In the basement, Suzan found the tattered treasure, full of handwritten and meticulously typed recipes, peppered with her grandmother Matilda’s commentary in the margins. Reading it, Suzan realized she had found something more than a collection of recipes—she had found the key to her family’s survival through hard times.Suzan began re-creating Matilda’s “sturdy food” recipes for baked pork chops and beef stew, and Aunt Nettie’s clam chowder made with clams dug up by Suzan’s grandfather Charlie in Long Island Sound. And she began uncovering the stories of her resilient family’s past. Taking inspiration from stylish, indomitable Matilda, who was the sole support of her family as a teenager during the Great Depression (and who always answered “How are you?” with “Fabulous, never better!”), and from dashing, twice-widowed Charlie, Suzan starts to approach her own crisis with a sense of wonder and gratitude. It turns out that the gift to survive and thrive through hard times had been bred in her bones all along.Cherries in Winter is an irresistible gem of a book. It makes you want to cook, it makes you want to know your own family’s stories, and, above all, it makes you feel rich no matter what.

    Her reward for the grueling work of rescuing birds—such as feeding baby hummingbirds every twenty minutes all day long—is her empathy with them and the satisfaction of knowing the world is a birdier and more beautiful place. The Bluebird Effect is about the change that's set in motion by one single act, such as saving an injured bluebird—or a hummingbird, swift, or phoebe. Each of the twenty five chapters covers a different species, and many depict an individual bird, each with its own personality, habits, and quirks. And each chapter is illustrated with Zickefoose's stunning watercolor paintings and drawings. Not just individual tales about the trials and triumphs of raising birds, The Bluebird Effect mixes humor, natural history, and memoir to give readers an intimate story of a life lived among wild birds.

    At the age of 34, John Pollack quit a prestigious speechwriting job on Capitol Hill to pursue an idea he had harbored since the age of six: to build a boat out of wine corks and take it on an epic journey.In Cork Boat, Pollack tells the charming and uplifting story of this unlikely adventure. Overcoming one obstacle after another, he convinces skeptical bartenders to save corks, corrals a brilliant but disorganized partner, and cajoles more than a hundred volunteers to help build the boat, many until their fingers bleed. Hired as a speechwriter for President Clinton midway through construction, Pollack soon has the White House saving corks, too. Ultimately, he and his crew set sail down the Douro River in Portugal, where the boat becomes a national sensation. Written with unusual grace and disarming humor, Cork Boat is a buoyant tale of camaraderie, determination, and the power of imagination.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Have you ever seen a volume like this? Well, whether you realize it or not, it’s the one you’ve been waiting for. Jeff Foxworthy’s Redneck Dictionary will teach you how to speak this unique Southern dialect fluently. Whether you’re blue-collar or hoity-toity, swimming in cash or betting your bottom dollar, a little bit country or a lot of city slicker, this practical reference to redneck words and turns of phrases will give you hours of laughs.So expand your horizons and learn another language with this fun, instructive, and hilariously illustrated book as your guide. After all, speaking redneck is a heck of a lot easier than speaking French!From the Hardcover edition.

    A lyrical response to the struggles of Black lives in our world . . . to America’s crisis of conscience . . . to the centuries of loss, endless resilience, and unstoppable hope.   Includes an introduction by the author and a bold, graphically designed interior.

    Grit, manliness, individualism, merit, profit and providence, dominion over our environment, thrift, and above all pride in our country—these qualities define us, and are the reason that hundreds of millions of people worldwide look to America for hope, inspiration, and opportunity.But it’s precisely these virtues that now are under attack by the radical Left of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and their followers. America as we know it is eroding before our eyes and becoming what Fox News Channel personality and co-host of “The Five” Eric Bolling calls a “politically correct nanny state.” The rewards for individual achievement and hard work, our basic constitutional rights, religious faith, national identity, and capitalism itself, are being replaced by a dangerous socialistic ideology that is the polar opposite of what our Founding Fathers intended America to be. It’s time for us to wake up and heed the clear-cut warning signs that America is heading in the wrong direction--before we’re too far gone. Eric Bolling knows firsthand what makes America great. Raised in a struggling blue-collar family in Chicago, his parents showed him that hard work and firm values can get you far in life. Those values drove him as a young baseball player to being drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates, then success as a New York Mercantile Exchange trader, and now his daily role on Fox News Channel. A celebration of America that is informed by Bolling’s personal story, Wake Up America is a much-needed call to arms for America’s citizens to preserve and protect our country's present and future.

    Stephanie Tourles offers 150 original recipes for herbal balms, oils, salves, liniments, and other topical ointments to treat a wide range of conditions. This comprehensive guide is filled with safe and effective cures for scores of common ailments, including headaches, backaches, arthritis, insomnia, splinters, and more. Take control of your well-being and stock your family’s medicine cabinet with gentle, all-natural homemade healing formulations.

    For the next twenty-eight years, they shared an unlikely, special bond. Angelou was a teacher and a maternal figure to Smiley, and they talked often, of art, politics, history, race, religion, music, love, purpose, and--more than anything--courage. Courage to be open, to follow dreams, to believe in oneself.In My Journey with Maya, Smiley recalls a joyful friendship filled to the brim with sparkling conversation--in Angelou's gardens surrounded by her caged birds, before lectures, sharing meals, and on breaks from it all, they sought each other out for comfort, advice, and above all else, friendship.It began when he, a recent college graduate and a poor kid from a big family in the Midwest, was invited to join the revered writer on a sojourn to Africa. He would be handling her bags, but Maya didn't let that stop a friendship waiting to happen. Angelou was generous, challenging, and inspirational. Like a mother to him, she was selfless.Here Tavis Smiley shares his personal memories of Maya Angelou, of a decades-long friendship with one of history's most fascinating women, one who left as indelible an imprint on American culture as she did on him.

    Living on the farm with the former president and his wife, Mamie, were his son, daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren, the oldest of whom, David, was just entering his teens. In this engaging and fascinating memoir, David Eisenhower—whose previous book about his grandfather, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—provides a uniquely intimate account of the final years of the former president and general, one of the giants of the twentieth century. In Going Home to Glory, Dwight Eisenhower emerges as both a beloved and forbidding figure. He was eager to advise, instruct, and assist his young grandson, but as a general of the army and president, he held to the highest imaginable standards. At the same time, Eisenhower was trying to define a new political role for himself. Ostensibly the leader of the Republican party, he was prepared to counsel his successor, John F. Kennedy, who sought instead to break with Eisenhower’s policies. (In contrast, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, would eagerly seek Eisenhower’s advice.) As the tumultuous 1960s dawned, with assassinations, riots, and the deeply divisive war in Vietnam, plus a Republican nominee for president in 1964 whom Eisenhower considered unqualified, the former president tried to chart the correct course for himself, his party, and the country. Meanwhile, the past continued to pull on him as he wrote his memoirs, and publishers and broadcasters asked him to reminisce about his wartime experiences. When his grandfather took him on a post-presidential tour of Europe, David saw firsthand the esteem with which monarchs, prime ministers, and the people of Europe held the wartime hero. Then as later, David was under the watchful eye of a grandfather who had little understanding of or patience with the emerging rock ’n’ roll generation. But even as David went off to boarding school and college, grandfather and grandson remained close, visiting and corresponding frequently. David and Julie Nixon’s romance brought the two families together, and Eisenhower strongly endorsed his former vice-president’s successful run for the presidency in 1968. With a grandson’s love and devotion but with a historian’s candor and insight, David Eisenhower has written a remarkable book about the final years of a great American whose stature continues to grow.

    Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. “I’d better be a poet / Or lay down dead,” he wrote in “San Francisco Blues.” The celebrated “spontaneous bop prosody” of his prose was a direct outgrowth of the poetry that filled his notebooks throughout his writing life. This landmark edition gathers for the first time all of Kerouac’s major poetic works—Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Pomes All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Desolation Pops, Book of Haikus—along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time.Kerouac wrote poetry in forms as diverse as the classical Japanese haiku (and his own American variants of it, which he sometimes called “Pops”), the Buddhist sutra, the prose poetry of Old Angel Midnight (which he described as “the haddal-da-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight”), doggerel ballads and free-form songs, the psalms preserved in early notebooks, and the poetic “blues” he developed in Mexico City Blues and other serial works, seeing himself as “a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.”But his sense of form was closely allied to a commitment to spontaneous utterance—to a poetry awake to “All the endless conception of living beings / Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness / Throughout the ten directions of space”—and a longing for transcendent experience that marked his work from the beginning. “My only ambition,” he wrote in 1943, “is to be free in art.” That freedom came at a high personal price. Kerouac’s collected poems immerse us in what editor Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell describes as “the impenetrable complexities, engulfing vulnerabilities, and insoluble demands that life made on his heart and mind.”Many poets have found Kerouac a liberating influence on their work. Robert Creeley called him “a genius at the register of the speaking voice, a human voice talking”; Michael McClure saw him as using “the whole of his life . . . as an instrument of perception”; for Allen Ginsberg he was “a poetic influence over the entire planet”; and Bob Dylan singled out Mexico City Blues as crucial to his own artistic development.

    Here, from British historian and New Yorker senior writer Anthony Bailey is the dramatic story of the Low Countries - Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg - from the early days of nomads and barbarian invaders to the birth of towns and cities to the rise and decline of world prominence and finally to the dark and tragic days of World War II.