Aimee Mayo grew up in deep Alabama, rocked by the blow of a drunk man's fist before she even made it out of the womb. Her colorful and charismatic father went from a gambling janitor to a multi-millionaire, but died homeless. Her mother was wonderful when she wasn't popping pain pills like M&M's and her stepdad made a weird science out of psychological abuse. Throughout her teens, Aimee survived by writing compulsively in diaries, dreaming of becoming a songwriter and finding her soulmate.After accidentally burning down her house—just one in a series of disasters—at twenty years old she found herself lost with no path to the life she had always longed for. She tried to kill herself and almost succeeded.Finally, Aimee made it to Nashville. She started out a waitress, married to a wife-beating country singer, but never lost sight of her dreams. Talking to the Sky is her unforgettable memoir, the harrowing and hilarious story of believing in faith over fear and going after your dreams when everything is going against you.

    With Arbitron ratings clocking over 3+ million listeners a week and simulcast daily in 37 million homes on Free Speech TV, where she is also the number one show, her strongest numbers are in the grand prize demographic of highly educated males 25-54, despite, or maybe because of , her status as an out gay woman. It probably explains the sublime effectiveness of her national billboard slogan: "Stephanie Miller...making men rise in the morning". Stephanie also headlined the country’s number one comedy tour, “Stephanie Miller’s Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour", as well as the number one comedy album, "Stephanie Miller's Sexy Liberal Comedy Album". She has recently had her second #1 comedy album in the country with her "Stephanie Miller's Happy Hour, Volume One". She frequents the Holy Trinity of cable news: CNN, MSNBC, and FOX, where she bursts the infallibility balloons of right wingers, often with one well-aimed pinpoint punchline. Here is SEXY LIBERAL!, which you can see as Al Franken rewritten by Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler horizontal on the desk of The Daily Show. Steph is the youngest child of Congressman William Miller of NY, Barry Goldwater’s running mate in 1964. We all know how that turned out. Though Steph was only 3, she shows here how that defeat affected her as much as it changed the Republican Party. It made her who she is. SEXY LIBERAL! is the book her 3,000,000 fans have been begging her to write. it’s both deeply personal and hilariously political. But most of all it is Stephanie’s unique voice, her jokes, her happy clappy optimism, and her truth that they tune in to day after day, that they download as a subscription podcast, that they buy tickets for, to see her unbleeped and in person. That’s what SEXY LIBERAL! delivers. Like an uncensored comedy drone right to your door!“Stephanie Miller is like ice cream for breakfast, or box-wine through a Krazy Straw: pure pleasure that some people say is bad for you, but you know better. Sexy Liberal! is deeply, deeply profane, big-hearted, surprising, and it might make you pee your pants a little. Just what you need! Read this book. Stephanie Miller for Everything, 2016!”--Rachel Maddow, host of The Rachel Maddow and author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power “Sexy Liberal! is a great book with mind-expanding astuteness and side-splitting humor. Stephanie Miller is so wondrously witty and wise you will want to quote her. But, first, you must read her. Buy this book and help Amazon at last turn a profit. --Lily Tomlin “Sexy Liberal! is inspired reading. It is laugh-enhancing and beyond thought-provoking! A must read. --Jane Wagner Reading Stephanie's book is like being on the best kind of dinner date. The conversation is smart, funny and politically insightful. And Stephanie's contribution bad either. Seriously, what a fun read. Stephanie, in her wonderfully self-deprecating way, lets you into her brilliant mind, her no BS take on the political scene, and life itself. Enter at your own risk.--Rob Reiner

    Silver medal winner in the Health/Medical category of the 2013 Readers' Favorite Book Award. Finalist, 2013 Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Finalist, 2013 Indie Excellence Book Awards. Winner of an honorable mention in the category of Life Stories from the 20th Annual Writers Digest Book Awards.The unflinching and hopeful story of one woman's journey into family caregiving, and a vivid overview of the challenges of Alzheimer's care. Winner of an Honorable Mention in the category of Life Stories from the 20th Annual Writer's Digest Book Awards.With the passion of a committed daughter and the fervor of a tireless reporter, Martha Stettinius weaves this compelling story of caregiving for her demented mother with a broad exploration of the causes of Alzheimer's disease, means of treating it, and hopes for preventing it. She shares the lessons she's learned over seven years of caregiving at home, in assisted living, a rehabilitation center, a "memory care" facility for people living with dementia, and a nursing home--lessons not just about how to navigate the system, but how caregiving helped the author to overcome her challenging relationship with her mother, and how she's learned to nurture her mother's spirit through the most advanced stages of dementia.One in 8 people over age 65 has Alzheimer's disease, and nearly fifty percent of those over age 85. As baby boomers age, and we all live longer, most of us will know someone with Alzheimer's disease or another dementia, or care for someone with dementia. Alzheimer's disease is the fifth-leading cause of death in the United States for those age 65 and older, but the only one in the top 10 without a means of prevention, a way to slow its progression, or a cure. In the United States, over 15 million family caregivers provide 17.4 billion hours of unpaid care to family members and friends with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Sixty percent of family caregivers report feeling extreme stress.This memoir is not a lament, however; it is guide, and, the author hopes, a means to soften the blow upon all of us. In the course of the author's experience, she discovered what could have been done earlier to help her mother, and what can be done now to help us all. Ms. Stettinius's greatest gift to readers is that of optimism--that caregiving can deepen love, that dementia can be fought, and that families can be strengthened. Her book is appealing, enlightening, and inspiring.Through its intimate scenes and skillful storytelling, Inside the Dementia Epidemic is a call to action for better dementia care, more funding for dementia research, and more support for family caregivers. In the appendices, the author shares facts she wishes she had known years ago, including how to get a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease; what medications are approved to treat the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease; risk factors for dementia, and possible preventive measures; promising explorations in dementia research; the link between insulin resistance, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease; the benefits of "memory consultations" and early diagnosis; and national and international movements for more dementia research and better care.Inside the Dementia Epidemic: A Daughter's Memoir includes source notes, resources for caregivers, and an index.

    Teresa O'Kane had always longed to see the world. She owned scads of travel books and maps to prove it and was about to buy yet another bookcase to hold the many Lonely Planet guides and travel essays that she had accumulated over the years when she turned to her husband and said, "I'm tired of storing our dreams. Let's live them!" Within a month, they bought one-way tickets to Morocco, leased out their home, and set out on a journey of the African Continent top to bottom, from Casablanca to Cape Town. Transiting seventeen countries in 10 months, mostly by public transport, they explored wild, exotic, and historic locations they had only dreamed of and some they had never heard of. From sandy Timbuktu, to a tiny lemur populated island in Madagascar, the author embraces Africa. She strokes the manes of lions, contracts malaria, flies a micro light over Victoria Falls, earns a level one certification as a South African safari guide, discovers that an insect has turned her foot into a nursery for hundreds of eggs, grapples with the negative effects of foreign aid, and rubs elbows with European royalty deep within the Dogon in Mali. O'Kane offers an entertaining and enlightening look into overland travel on the African continent. Filled with helpful budget minded travel tips, this hilarious and inspiring book may find you yearning to take a career break of your own. Awards: The Indie Book Award for Best Memoir of 2012. San Francisco Book Festival Honorable Mention Award for Non-Fiction. Travelers Tales SOLAS for My Gambian Husband.

     Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time--the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun.In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas's neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present--unflinching, urgent--yet timeless and profound.

    The daughter of a pastor whose church was located in a rough-and-tumble area of Brooklyn, she witnessed the ravaging effects of the streets on the lives of the most desperate—drug addicts, derelicts, and other destitute people. Yet her own home was a haven of warmth, filled with affection and love.Then something happened that tore her away from it. With the flip of a switch, Chrissy fell deeper and deeper into deception where haunting images and songs pointed to one thing—perfection. Longing to be the girl in the song, she became entangled in an obsessive relationship. Before long, secret after secret led her down the path to becoming someone she didn’t even recognize. Locked in to an impossible life, Chrissy found release from a surprising direction.Girl in the Song tells the gripping, true story of a young woman whose choices led her to despair and incredible triumph. More than the story of one lost girl, Chrissy’s experience points to the power of hope to lead us away from destructive relationships and into a life that just might end happily ever after.

    Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson hit the most dramatic home run in the history of baseball. The moment occurred in the bottom of the ninth inning of a sudden-death playoff game between the New York Giants and their arch rivals from Brooklyn, the Dodgers. People across the nation watched on their new TV sets, and the home run became known as “the Shot Heard ’Round the World.” But after clearing the left-field wall, the central artifact of the play–the ball itself–inexplicably went missing. The mystery of what happened to the legendary baseball has remained unsolved for a half century. Until now.Miracle Ball is the gripping account of author Brian Biegel’s two-year effort to unravel the mystery that experts said could never be solved. After his father, Jack, finds a baseball at a thrift store with clues dating back to 1951 and believes it could possibly be the most coveted piece of sports history, father and son begin a journey to prove its authenticity. Biegel becomes consumed with the quest–recognizing it as the only chance to rescue himself from an emotionally devastating personal crisis that had long been crippling him.The trail takes Biegel, a sports fan and documentary filmmaker, from an auction house in Long Island to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, to a backroom meeting straight out of a Martin Scorsese film to a dusty oil field in Texas, finally arriving at his final destination on a quiet gravel road in New Mexico, the last place he ever expected to be.Along the way the author meets an amazing cast of characters, including Bobby Thomson himself, who help him in his quest. Each adds their personal memories of the golden age of baseball, giving a broader scope and greater depth to this real-life detective story. As entertaining as it is inspiring, Miracle Ball is a story about faith, family, and heroes, about overcoming the odds and coming into the light, and about discovering the wondrous result of believing in yourself–and the amazing benefits of unconditional love. A sports story for the ages, an engrossing mystery narrative, and a moving account of a man’s unbreakable bond with his family and of his struggles to save himself, Miracle Ball delivers both heart and headlines.

    After five days under consular protection, Smith was evacuated from a very different China to the country he first visited 23 years earlier.The visit marked a new twist in Australia’s 50-year diplomatic relationship with China which was now coming apart at the seams. But it also symbolised the authoritarianism creeping into every aspect of society under President Xi Jinping over the last three years.From Xinjiang’s re-education camps to the tear-gas filled streets of Hong Kong, Smith’s account of Xi Jinping’s China documents the country’s spectacular economic rise in the years leading up to the coronavirus outbreak.Through first-person accounts of life on the ground and interviews with friends as well as key players in Chinese society right up to the country’s richest man, The Last Correspondent explores what China’s rise to become the world’s newest superpower means for Australia and the rest of the world.

    

    Wilbur E. Bowe was living on his family’s farm when he was drafted in 1965 and assigned to Alpha Company, 5th Battalion, 7th Calvary. The 5/7th Cavalry was formed as a brand-new battalion in order to fill out the 1st Air Cavalry Division’s 3rd Brigade. The young men of the battalion were largely drafted together in 1965 as the build-up of regular Army forces in Vietnam had just begun. Together, these impossibly young men would be trained in the airmobile infantry and become what were known as “skytroopers”. They would then be sent deep into the jungles of Vietnam, where together they would learn what “search and destroy” meant and face the reality of this new war.The story features many of the letters and photographs my dad sent home from the war zone. His dispatches were sent from some of the most remote valleys and outposts in Vietnam, written under the most austere of conditions, often scribbled in haste before another mission, or by flashlight, under a poncho in the rain. They would travel over 8,000 miles across the ocean, to be placed in a mailbox that stood across from a farmhouse, along a rural county road in Wisconsin.Many former skytroopers of Alpha Company were interviewed for this story, and their personal accounts recall much of the humor and friendship they shared, along with the sadness and tragedy that would accompany a year spent in the jungles of Vietnam. The story also draws upon the 5/7th Cavalry’s daily staff journals and situation reports for every day of the battalion’s first year in Vietnam.This is their story, told in great detail from their time spent training together at Fort Carson – through their historic journey across the ocean aboard the USNS Gaffey, where they would encounter a massive typhoon – through their many battles fought together in Vietnam – and eventually, their final patrol.

    Restlessly crossing back and forth between the boundaries of family and freedom, England and America, home and away, she has sought but generally failed to contain an adventurous spirit within the confines of conventional living. When she awakes one morning stymied by an existential panic, Pollen grudgingly concludes that in order to move forward, she needs to take a good look at her past. In Meet Me in the In-Between, Pollen takes us on the illuminating journey of a life, from her privileged, unorthodox childhood in Upper Manhattan through early marriage to a son of an alluring Mafioso, to the dusty border towns of Mexico where she falls in with a crowd of Pink Floyd-loving smugglers. Throughout all, Bella grapples intently with relationships, motherhood, career ups and downs, and a pathological fear of being boxed in. Interwoven with exquisite passages of graphic memoir, this is a tender, funny, and deeply honest story of one woman's quest to keep looking for the extraordinary in an ordinary life. With patented mix of humor and pain, novelist Bella Pollen takes a dead-on look at what it means to be a smart, reasonably sane woman navigating the modern world.

    Now, James Scurlock engages, educates, and entertains readers with the captivating story of DHL co-founder and billionaire Larry Hillblom.King Larry begins with an early biography of Larry Lee Hillblom, a mercurial young man who grew up on a peach farm outside of Fresno, California. Hillblom co-founded DHL in 1969 (three years before FedEx), and it became the fastest-growing corporation in history. Hillblom’s expatriate life began in 1981, when he retreated to a small tax haven in the Western Pacific. There he led the resistance to American meddling in the Marianas Islands. Hillblom’s voracious appetite for underage prostitutes is another facet of his unusual story. In 1995, Hillblom’s amoral, thrill-seeking nature caught up to him when his seaplane disappeared off the coast of Anatahan, leaving behind an estate worth billions. Weeks later, five impoverished women and their attorneys came forward to challenge Hillblom’s will in a legal battle for his fortunes that continues to this day. Meticulously researched and thoroughly engaging, King Larry will satisfy fans of such bestsellers as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Accidental Billionaires .

    On social networks and dating sites, his image and identity—a forty-year-old straight white male—had been used to hook countless women into believing in lies of love and romance. Was it all an ironic cosmic joke? Almost a decade prior, William himself had been living a lie that had lasted for more than twenty years. His secret? He was a gay man, a fact he hid from his wife and two daughters for almost as long as he had hidden it from himself.In this emotional and unflinchingly honest memoir of coming out of the closet late in life, owning up to the past, and facing the future, William Dameron confronts steroid addiction, the shame and homophobia of his childhood, the sledgehammer of secrets that slowly tore his marriage apart, and his love for a gay father of three that would once again challenge the boundaries of trust. At the true heart of The Lie is a universal story about turning self-doubt into self-acceptance and about pain, anger, and the long journey of both seeking and giving forgiveness.

    FOCUS takes readers into Ingrid’s world as she faces the crippling fear of not being able to see her two young daughters grow up, of becoming a burden to her husband, of losing the career she loves, and of being robbed of the independence that defines her.Ultimately, FOCUS is about Ingrid’s quest to fix her eyes that ends up fixing her life. Through an eight-year journey marked by a trip to South Africa to write about AIDS orphans, a four-day visit with a doctor who focuses on whole-body health, a relationship-changing confrontation with her husband and a life-changing lesson from her daughters, Ingrid learns to embrace the moment and see what counts—something no amount of vision loss can take from her.

    You don't have the look, you don't have the talent, and your name is ridiculous. You are the last guy I would ever pick to be a movie star."This was the first piece of advice Steve Guttenberg ever received from an agent. Like many other times in his life, he didn't listen.In this honest, charming memoir, Guttenberg tells the unique story of his first decade in Hollywood, as he went from being a complete unknown to starring in some of the most successful blockbusters of all time. He spent his early days sneaking onto the Paramount lot and meeting more actors and casting agents than most aspiring actors ever would. Even before the hit Police Academy---which his manager said would be a flop---he had already worked with such luminaries as Lord Laurence Olivier, Richard Widmark, and Gregory Peck. Later he shared the screen with actors such as Mickey Rourke and Sharon Stone long before they became household names.Guttenberg has lived through the addictive pull of show business and worldwide celebrity (you're no one until you have a stalker, he learns). With a clear-eyed appreciation for the one-of-a-kind experiences that the celebrity lifestyle has to offer, he knew that his family would keep him grounded throughout it all. And his self-awareness and sense of humor about the ups and downs of fame make The Guttenberg Bible one of the most candid Hollywood stories to date.