These pieces thus explore, with quiet grace, the unexpected pleasures that are gleaned from an appreciation of the ordinary - a sleeping cat, a blooming garden, a well-cooked meal. Such familiar - even ostensibly mundane - details of our lives, Steinbach maintains, play a far more important part in shaping our identities and our sense of our relationship to the world than do the exotic encounters or momentous events to which we attach much significance. Alternately poignant and humorous, sedately contemplative and bristling with emotional energy, Steinbach's various musings on the daily rhythms of her own moods and experiences transform everyday life into a rich and meaningful journey.

    <br><br>Part Tuscan idyll and part cautionary tale, Wendy Laird’s latest Kindle Single tells the flip-side story of expat existence, what it takes to make it happen, and how a life on a well-mapped trajectory can veer off course in the process. Laird’s beautiful prose and acerbic wit keep the book, if not her own agenda, on the right track.

    1780–1833) was an American fur trapper and frontiersman noted for his exploits in the American West during the first third of the 19th century. Glass was born in Pennsylvania, to Irish parents. He was an explorer of the watershed of the Upper Missouri River in present day North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. Glass was famed, most of all, as a frontier folk hero for his legendary cross-country trek after being mauled by a grizzly bear. Glass' most famous adventure began in 1822, when he responded to an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette and Public Adviser, placed by General William Ashley, which called for a corps of 100 men to "ascend the river Missouri" as part of a fur trading venture. These men would later be known as Ashley's Hundred. Besides Glass, others who joined the enterprise included notables such as James Beckwourth, Thomas Fitzpatrick, David Jackson, John Fitzgerald, William Sublette, Jim Bridger, and Jedediah Smith. Early in the trek, Glass established himself as a hard-working fur trapper. He was apparently wounded on this trip in a battle with Arikara, and later traveled with a party of 13 men to relieve traders at Fort Henry, at the mouth of the Yellowstone River. The expedition, led by Andrew Henry, planned to proceed from the Missouri, up the valley of the Grand River in present-day South Dakota, then across to the valley of the Yellowstone. The sketch in this book is related by the explorer and Army officer Philip St. George Cooke. This book originally published by Lindsay & Blakiston in 1857 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.

    The 94th ended the war in France with the highest number of air victories of any American squadron. Captain Rickenbacker later belonged to an association of pilots and Great War air veterans who, in the years immediately following the Second World War, invited many of the new "young" aces from the Pacific and European theaters for informal lectures. These men never lost their keen interest in aviation.

    ‘Flying the Knife Edge’ is the story of an ordinary man experiencing extraordinary things as a pilot in Papua New Guinea in the 1990s. After an untimely exit from the Royal New Zealand Air Force, New Zealander Matt McLaughlin took a leap into the unknown, travelling to Papua New Guinea to work as a missionary pilot. He soon switched from missionary to mercenary, and over the next three and a half years, as he built up the necessary experience to chase his goal of becoming an airline captain, his life was a rollercoaster ride of adventure, risk, near-misses, and tragedy. Matt lived on the knife edge of bush pilot ops in one of the world’s most dangerous flying environments. Along the way he soaked up some fascinating local history: the country's vital role in WWII’s Pacific Theatre; the disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart; the chaos of the Bougainville civil war; the Morobe gold rush of the 1930s... “The gap in the cloud became smaller and smaller as I descended, a shrinking tunnel twisting down the gorge. In a matter of seconds I was so low my wheels barely cleared the trees on the valley floor as I passed, and jungle-clad walls closed in on me until I was a mere wingspan from both sides of the valley. And then, in an instant, the gap was gone and I was flying blind. In cloud. In the bottom of a gorge. With terrain on both sides rising thousands of feet above me. Time stopped. The passengers started screaming, anticipating the aircraft impacting the side of the mountain. And their deaths. I had the capacity for just one other thought: Will I hear the sound of the airframe smashing into the trees as we crash, or will I be dead before it registers?”

    An unforgettable sailing adventure to the world's most dangerous continent.

    Over the past year, author and former Major League baseball player Ben Petrick has developed a loyal readership for his stories about his remarkable life, beginning with his meteoric rise from prep hero to big-league catcher; to the concealment of his stunning Parkinson's diagnosis after his rookie season; to his return home to a very private life with his wife and daughter; and finally to his decision to undergo a highly risk procedure to lessen his symptoms — not once, but twice.

    The book also features an exclusive foreword by rock legend Glenn Hughes (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple).

    There was no immediate response on my part, only a deep sense of fear entombed by a completely paralyzed inner spirit. Much to my surprise, he spoke again: "Sir, you've waited too long to get here. You're not going to make it." And he continued: "If you believe in God, this is the time to make peace." In that very moment, I said to myself, "What do you mean, 'If you believe in God?' Of course I believe in God! I'm a man of faith and a Catholic priest!" Fr. John Tourangeau, O. Praem., a Norbertine priest who had an afterlife experience following a major heart attack, emphatically states, "Heaven is for real!" Within this enlightening and hope-filled book, Fr. John weaves a powerful and dynamic tapestry of the Kingdom of God at hand through the exploration of Christian tradition, Sacred Scripture, Catholic teaching, as well as his own lived experiences. "While the fullness of heaven cannot be fully experienced in our life here on earth," Father explains, "we are able to more fully experience God's love for us through our relationships with others. For it is in and through these relationships that we draw closer to Christ and his promise for us."

    He was drawn to trouble like water to a sponge.After experiencing a troubled childhood during which Alan was in and out of children's homes - after being put into care at the tender age of eighteen months old - Alan was a teenager in 1981 when he was sentenced to life in prison for murder during a robbery that had gone badly wrong. He served thirty-two years in various prisons throughout the United Kingdom. This book tells the truth of what goes on behind prison walls and exposes the level of inhumane treatment and brutality that Alan had to endure throughout his thirty-two year journey, during which he never stopped standing up for human rights.Fighting against the degrading prison system of the late twentieth century, Alan helped change the historical humiliating slop out and weekly shower that hundreds of thousands of prisoners had to adhere to throughout the centuries. The battle came at a cost though as it meant more time behind bars, time spent mainly in the segregation unit.Powerfully detailing the way prisoners are treated on a daily basis, Life in Strangeways is a gripping tale that will change the perception of Alan Lord: convicted murderer and riot leader.

    Soon wielding syringes, this forty-something husband and father of two children becomes the doper next door.During his yearlong odyssey, Tilin is transformed. He becomes stronger, hornier, and aggressive. He wades into a subculture of doping physicians, real estate agents, and aging women who believe that Tilin’s type of legal “hormone replacement therapy” is the key to staying young—and he often agrees. He also lives with the price paid for renewed vitality, worrying about his health, marriage, and cheating ways as an amateur bike racer. And all along the way, he tells us what doping is really like—empowering and scary.

    Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, this is the story of a young woman's accidental career as a cocktail lounge piano player, and the adventures and encounters that follow.

    Part memoir, part feminist manifesto, Amazon Woman shows what incredible feats we are capable of and will encourage people, especially women, across all backgrounds and ages to find the courage and strength to live the life they’ve imagined.This 148-day journey began on Darcy Gaechter’s 35th birthday.  She sold her successful outdoor adventure business, upsetting her partner and boyfriend of twelve years and getting them both fired in the process.  The emotional waters that would fester and erupt on the ensuing journey was often more challenging to navigate than the mighty river itself. With blistering lips and irradiated fingernails, Darcy would tackle raging Class Five whitewater for twenty-five days straight, barely survived a dynamite-filled canyon being prepared for a new hydroelectric plan.  She and her two companions would encounter illegal loggers, narco-traffickers, murderous Shining Path rebels, and ruthless poachers in the black market trade in endangered species.  They would plead for mercy at the hands of the murderous Ashaninka people who were convinced that they had come to steal their children’s organs. In a desperate attempt meant to give her some pretense of control, Darcy even cut off all her hair before entering Peru’s notoriously dangerous “Red Zone” in hopes of passing for a boy and being seen as less of a target. At once a heart-pounding adventure and a celebration of pushing personal limits, Amazon Woman speaks to all of us feeling trapped by our desk-bound, online society.  This a story of finding the courage and strength to challenge nature, cultures, social norms, and oneself.

    With a child’s uncluttered eye, she describes the small details—shopping in the market, men waiting for work at the dock gates, the rituals of washday, and the sights, sounds, and smells of the old East End of London. She also describes the fear—of illness, of unemployment, of the workhouse—that hung over her family and thousands like them, and her determination that her own children would never know the kind of poverty she had experienced.

    A member of Easy Company of Band of Brothers fame, Shames saw combat in some of the most ferocious battles of World War II. From jumping behind the lines of Normandy on D-Day with the 101st Airborne Division, to the near victory of Operation Market Garden, to the legendary stand at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, Shames fought his way across Europe and into Germany itself.In Airborne Shames and writer Ian Gardner (Tonight We Die As Men) tell the gripping true story of what it was like to be at the spear point of World War II in Europe. Neither the book nor TV series of Band of Brothers ever showed the real Ed Shames. Although he started as a private, combat soon forged Shames into a tough and inspired leader who would win a battlefield commission in Normandy. Seeming always to be where the fighting was, his two goals were to prevail in each fight against the Germans, and to keep his men alive. “Shames, you are the meanest, roughest son of a bitch I've ever had to deal with. But you brought us home,” was what he considered to be the highest compliment he received from one of his men.Even though he was wounded in the Ardennes, Ed Shames never stopped fighting until Germany surrendered and the war was won. He has never stopped being a warrior.