The book also detailed his early work as a pioneering orthopaedic surgeon at the cutting edge of world medicine. In Going Back, Munjed shares the extraordinary journey that his life-changing new surgical technique has taken him on. Through osseointegration, he implants titanium rods into the human skeleton and attaches robotic limbs, allowing patients genuine, effective and permanent mobility. Munjed has performed this operation on hundreds of Australian civilians, wounded British soldiers who've lost legs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a survivor of the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand. But nothing has been as extraordinary as his return to Iraq after eighteen years, at the invitation of the Iraqi government, to operate on soldiers, police and civilian amputees wounded in the horrific war against ISIS. These stories are both heartbreaking and full of hope, and are told from the unique perspective of a refugee returning to the place of his birth as a celebrated international surgeon.

    This chronicle of life in the skin trade follows the meteoric rise of Stacey Keith, a girl scarcely out of her teens whose eye-popping assets launch her from wet T-shirt contests to the catwalks of Houston, strip bar capital of the world. Almost overnight, she is discovered by a famous porn star, who Svengalis her onto the pages of Playboy, Penthouse, and dozens of other men’s magazines. While strutting her stuff onstage and across the country, Stacey makes the fateful decision to head to Hollywood. She’s got everything a girl could want: fame, attention, endless piles of cash...but no idea what awaits her. With Internet porn overtaking men’s magazines, everyone from her Mafia-boss road manager to her smarmy talent agent pressures Stacey to do more than just flash her flesh. Uber-boob filmmaker Russ Meyer verbally abuses her; rocker Don Henley tries to use her. Yet through it all, from the warped misogyny of Playboy to the S&M dungeons of the Pacific Palisades, Stacey’s dark, self-deprecating humor will leave you laughing, crying and rooting for her at every step of the way.

    This is the amazing story of a woman who survived a near fatal explosion. Incredibly, that was only the beginning of her story. During the event, she experienced a NDE (Near Death Experience). She retained vivid memories of going to the spirit side and from that unique out-of-body perspective; she helped celestial beings put her body back together so she could return to life. She wanted to share what the experience was like as viewed from the spirit side. A true tale of survival and courage, sure to empower others who read it.

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    Two essays by Frederick Douglass in which he tells of his escape from the LLoyd Plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, and gives his views on Reconstruction when he returned for a visit to the Eastern Shore following the Civil War.

    But eight-year-old Dennis turned out to be more than he expected—a lot more. Dennis suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, the son of a substance abuser and alcoholic who abandoned him in a seedy motel at the age of one-and-a-half. His father died of an overdose. Seized by the state, Dennis was shuffled between eight different foster homes in less than eight years. He was abused and beaten severely in at least tow of his placements. Dennis was diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and put on Ritalin and then Disipramine. He was prone to violent emotional outbursts. His case history identified him as "hard to place" —a euphemism for "unadoptable." But for David Gerrold it was love at first sight…

    The ISBN for the set is 9780307595577.On Stieg Larsson, a previously unpublished collection of essays about and correspondence with the author.

    Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has proven elusive.Now, a brilliant, complicated and utterly arresting woman emerges from this landmark book. Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished letters for this definitive collection; she also provides extensive and illuminating commentary on Hurston’s life and work, as well as an annotated glossary of the organizations and personalities that were important to it. From her enrollment at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy in 1917, to correspondence with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Langston Hughes, Dorothy West and Alain Locke, to a final query letter to her publishers in 1959, Hurston’s spirited correspondence offers an invaluable portrait of a remarkable, irrepressible talent.

    

    "A superb biography of an exceptional novelist" (New Yorker). Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Index; photographs.

    She fought the stereotype. Then she fought the greatest force of all-- fire.When the San Francisco Fire Department broke their all-male rule to hire women, Caroline Paul never thought she'd be chosen. She had already enrolled in film school. And Caroline, a strikingly beautiful Stanford graduate, didn't fit anyone's idea of a fireman. Except her own.Even though she loved testing her limits on white water rivers or Alpine mountains, plunging into a flame-engulfed building would be different than anything she had ever done. Now, in hard-edged prose as crackling as a four-alarm fire, she tells her amazing story. From her fight to match her colleagues physically and mentally, to her silent determination to face her fears, she tells of infernos, heroism, and heartbreaking tragedy. And with a will forged by fire, she reveals one woman's realization of a dream burning in her soul.

    Inspired by European post-impressionism, Vanessa’s experimental work places her at the vanguard of early twentieth-century art, as does her role in helping introduce many key names – Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso – to an unsuspecting public in 1910. Virginia took these artistic innovations and applied them to literature, pushing the boundaries of form, narrative and language to find a voice uniquely her own. Yet their private lives were just as experimental. Forming the core of the Bloomsbury Group, they welcomed into their London and Sussex homes a host of their talented peers and followed their hearts in the pursuit of love. Vanessa’s marriage to art critic Clive Bell was shaken early on by his flirtation with her sister, but this allowed her to find happiness with fellow artist Roger Fry. It was the predominantly homosexual Duncan Grant, though, who would become her lifelong partner, as they shared and decorated their home, Charleston, making it a living showpiece for their art. Virginia’s marriage to Leonard Woolf placed him more in the role of carer than husband, with the pair abstaining from sex and living under a regime designed to meet the needs of Virginia’s fragile mental health. Her meeting with the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West and their lesbian affair led Virginia to write one of the masterpieces of modern literature. What led the sisters to make such choices? How did they reconcile life and art? How did it feel, in early modern Britain, to live outside the social box? The sisters lived bravely, passionately and innovatively; where did this strength and talent come from?

    A Life with Books is an essay specially commissioned for Independent Booksellers Week, supplied exclusively to independent bookshops. In it, Julian Barnes writes about his early awareness of books and about his obsessive book-collecting and time spent in second-hand bookshops around the country. He ends by praising the physical book and expressing the confident hope that it will survive.A Life with Books is published as a pamphlet, with cover art by Suzanne Dean, the renowned designer responsible for the cover of Julian Barnes’ Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending.

    No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    James Whiteside has dreamed of standing on that very mark as a principal dancer with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre ever since he was a twelve-year-old blown away by watching the company's spring gala: the glamour, the virtuosity, the extremely fit men in tights!In this absurd and absurdist collection of essays, Whiteside tells us the story of how he got to the top of his field--stopping along the way to muse about the tragically fated childhood pets who taught him how to feel, reminisce on summer dance camps at which he paid more attention to partying than to ballet, and imagine fantastical run-ins with Jesus on Grindr. Also in these pages are tales of the two alter egos he created to subvert the strict classical rigor of ballet: JbDubs, an out-and-proud pop musician, and �hu Betch, an over-the-top drag queen named after Yoohoo chocolate milk.Center Center is an exuberant behind-the-scenes tour of Whiteside's triple life, both on- and offstage--a raunchy, curious, and unapologetic celebration of pushing boundaries and expressing yourself to the fullest, as well as the debut of a sparkling comedic voice that will resonate with anyone who has a mortifying Google search history or cringe-worthy teenage memories they'd rather forget.