Over the next 11 years, operations took him from the jungles of East Timor to the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, from the southern Indian Ocean to Iraq. What he learned about friendship, and about himself, changed him forever.Fennell's missions forced him to stare death in the face many times. From dodging mines and bullets in Iraq's Anbar province to assisting the recovery effort after the Asian tsunami, his experiences are shocking and confronting - but also inspiring.An unflinching look inside the action and the fear, the tragedy and the bravery of one soldier's service in the Australian SAS, WARRIOR BROTHERS is also an edge-of-your-seat adrenaline ride with a group of men you will never forget.

    Touchdown could mean that we've just won another football National Championship or it could indicate that a tornado is on the ground.  I could never be a storm chaser. I'm the one the storm chases. Funnels circle around me like shark fins as I bow my head in a school hallway, kneel down in a convent, or give birth to a newborn baby wailing in unison with the tornado sirens.  I huddle with toddlers in showers and beg for shelter in a McDonald's freezer. I remain a sitting duck in a second-floor apartment, and find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time while in the emergency room with storm victims.Life in the Rocket City is a thrill ride which is not for the faint of heart, this I know. So brace yourself for a front row seat on a ride through Tornado Valley! Alabama is the home of the world's deadliest twisters, and Huntsville is in the heart of the arena. Our space history is out of this world, but our tornado history will blow you away.Take a rollercoaster ride through the history of Alabama tornadoes before plunging into the gripping story of the Day of Devastation. Witness the stars falling on Alabama in 1833. Then get ready for the sky to fall! The plot twists as Huntsville's torrid tornado past comes alive in the 1974 Super Tornado Outbreak. The rollercoaster corkscrews as it encounters an unexpected twister in 1989 that slingshots the reader into the angry vortex on Airport Road. The ride cruises before taking another gut-wrenching dive that catapults its riders into an inverted twist from yet another Anderson Hills tornado in 1995. The town turns upside-down but Huntsville survives, revives, and thrives. But the worst is yet to come. Another tornado season is just around the corner. Beware of the month of April, especially on a Wednesday.The warning sirens wail, we're bombarded by softball-sized hail, and an EF3 tornado slams into the jail. It's just another day in Alabama, but the countdown clock is ticking. The next tornado warning could be "the one." Our voice drops to a whisper when we mention an EF5. We realize life is too short. The coaster accelerates. Can you feel the torque? We have no idea what's around the next bend. Suddenly, the nightmare comes true as the ride zooms out of control, this time in a free-fall on April 27, 2011. Alabama is bombarded by a record 62 tornadoes in one day. Abruptly, the ride comes to a screeching halt. The adrenaline rush subsides. You've just experienced Huntsville's Havoc. Immediately the passengers ask one another, "Do you want to ride again?" Some will and some swear, never again.

    As publication loomed, Mrs. Gaskell was keen to escape the reviews. So, leaving her dull minister husband and dreary provincial city behind, she set off with her daughters to Rome. There she met a dazzling group of artists and writers, among them the American critic Charles Eliot Norton. Seventeen years her junior, Norton was her one true love. They could not be together--it would be an unthinkable breach of convention--but by his side and amidst that splendid circle, Mrs. Gaskell knew she had reached the "tip-top point of [her] life." In 2013, Nell Stevens is embarking on her PhD--about the community of artists and writers living in Rome in the mid-19th century--and falling head over heels for a soulful American screenwriter in another city. As her long-distance romance founders and her passion for academia never quite materializes, she is drawn to Mrs. Gaskell. Could this indomitable Victorian author rescue Nell's pursuit of love, family and a writing career? Lively, witty, and impossible to put down, The Victorian and the Romantic is a moving chronicle of two women each charting a way of life beyond the rules of her time.

    Bernie Schein was his best friend from the time they met in a high-school pickup basketball game in Beaufort, South Carolina, until Conroy’s death in 2016. Both were popular athletes but also outsiders as a Jew and a Catholic military brat in the small-town Bible-Belt South, and they bonded. Wise ass and smart aleck, loudmouths both, they shared an ebullient sense of humor and romanticism, were mesmerized by the highbrow and reveled in the low, and would sacrifice entire evenings and afternoons to endless conversation. As young teachers in the Beaufort area and later in Atlanta, they were activists in the civil rights struggle and against institutional racism and bigotry. Bernie knew intimately the private family story of the Conroys and his friend’s difficult relationship with his Marine Corps colonel father that Pat would draw on repeatedly in his fiction. A love letter and homage, and a way to share the Pat he knew, this book collects Bernie’s cherished memories about the gregarious, welcoming, larger-than-life man who remained his best friend, even during the years they didn’t speak. It offers a trove of insights and anecdotes that will be treasured by Pat Conroy’s many devoted fans.

    Pilates’ and William J. Miller’s first complete fitness writings. It details the exercises, poses, and instructions fundamental to the matwork developed by Joseph and Clara Pilates. Based on his concepts of a balanced body and mind, and drawn from the approach espoused by the early Greeks, these are the exercises that continue to sustain a worldwide revolution in fitness strategies and exercise techniques. Joseph Pilates has been nothing short of revolutionary in his impact on the world of fitness and exercise. Readers will learn and view the original 34 exercises that Pilates taught to his students, many of whom have become exercise gurus in their own right. These carefully designed exercises constitute the results of decades of scientific study and research into the variety of physical ills that upset the balance of body and mind. Practitioners of Pilates’ forms and exercises in the 21st century continue to expand upon this earlier work by presenting a variety of creative new approaches involving circular movements, standing postures, and core strengthening exercises using props such as tubes, weights, poles, bands, magic circles, mini-balls, stability balls, foam rollers, and more.Now included in this Revised Edition are 18 additional pages of explanations of what has transpired since the original 1945 work, along with several photo/text sequences of the latest 21st-century enhancements in the Pilates world. There are new descriptive pages of text that first describe the fitness principles evolved from Pilates’ original Contrology work. This is followed by detailed text describing 21st-century evolutionary developments that present the key dancers, choreographers, and leaders in the Pilates Studio and certifying organizations through the present. This section ends with a discussion of evolutionary props and apparatus developments, plus 21st-century sample exercises drawn from our larger new book, Pilates Evolution for the 21st Century. Following this section are three complete prop-based demonstration exercises that include both photographic sequences (four per exercise) and step-by-step instructions for 21st-century Pilates exercises using the magic circle, elastic resistance, and the small fitness mini-ball.

    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.

    As they take on the management of their new employers’ majestic house, will the opportunities to create luscious food for the guests and explore rural France enable them to create a dream life? Or will French officialdom, family illness and a sudden career curveball send them hurrying home to New Zealand?Perfect for fans of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, Janine Marsh’s My Good Life in France and Beth Haslam’s Fat Dogs and French Estates.

    Adoption was a shameful business then in many people's eyes, the babies being mostly illegitimate. Better not speak of it.' Allan Ahlberg was adopted as a baby. In 1938 he was picked up in London by his new mother and taken back to Oldbury in the Black Country. Now one of the most successful children's book writers in the world, in The Bucket he describes an oddly enchanted childhood lived out in an industrial town during the 1940s, in conditions which today we might describe as 'deprived'. He writes of a father in overalls smelling of wood shavings and oil, of a tough and fiercely protective mother who cries when he discovers that he is adopted, of life assurance policies ('£6 if the child dies under age 3') and fearsome bacon slicers, of half-remembered trips to his mother's sister's grave and to the bluebell woods. And of his first days at school: 'Allan could do much better. He is most inattentive and dreamy at times' (school report, December 1946). Using a mix of prose and poetry, supported by new drawings by his daughter Jessica and old photographs, The Bucket retrieves a childhood which lovers of Ahlberg's classic picturebooks The Baby's Catalogue, Burglar Bill and Peepo! might feel they have glimpsed before but which are now exquisitely brought to life. This beautiful, exquisitely designed book, which will also appeal to fans of Gervase Phinn, Alan Bennett, Roald Dahl and Nigel Slater's Toast, will be loved by generations of Ahlberg fans. 'Allan Ahlberg has a string of children's classics to his name' Nicolette Jones, Guardian Born in Croydon but brought up by his adopted parents in the Black Country town of Oldbury, Allan Ahlberg held jobs as a gravedigger, postman and plumber's mate before becoming a teacher. He taught for ten years before collaborating with his wife Janet on a series of much-loved, now classic children's picture books including Peepo!, Burglar Bill, Cops and Robbers, Each Peach Pear Plum, Woof!, Heard it in the Playground, Please Mrs Butler, The Boyhood of Burglar Bill, The Pencil, Friendly Matches, The Improbable Cat, Goldilocks, My Brother's Ghost, The Mighty Slide, Collected Poems, The Boy, the Wolf, the Sheep and the Lettuce and The Ha Ha Bonk Book.

    Benson’s goal with this memoir is to help patients and their loved ones get through surgery and recovery with knowledge and humor. Robby Benson wrote the book to “help readers and their families deal with all kinds of illnesses – it’s not heart specific. As baby boomers, our parents, and now our friends, loved ones and contemporaries are dealing with life-changing diagnoses – it’s a new chaos in our lives that we have to deal with. I hope to make readers laugh when at times it seems the events in our lives are overwhelming.”

    His world crashed down after he smashed his right ankle and causing severe damage to his left fibia and tibia. It was unclear if he would ever walk properly again, let alone ride a motorbike. Charley recounts the ambulance ride, the numerous operations in a Portugese hospital, the medivac flight back to London, and his journey of recovery. As his inability to walk for several months provokes introspection, Boorman recounts his childhood, where his passion for motorbikes began, and the formative influences in his life—from his father, a famed director, to his longtime friend Ewan McGregor, and Sean Connery’s son Jason, who introduced him to bikes. These touchstones give him strength on the long way back to health.

    This story of three closely related Oxfordshire communities - a hamlet, the nearby village and a small market town - is based on the author's experiences during childhood and youth. It chronicles May Day celebrations and forgotten children's games, the daily lives of farmworkers and craftsmen, friends and relations - all painted with a gaiety and freshness of observation that make this trilogy an evocative and sensitive memorial to Victorian rural England.With a new introduction by Richard Mabey