At first I tried to deny my condition (trying to treat a tumor with hot baths and ice packs). Eventually, I decided I would learn as much about my illness as possible while trying to keep my emotions on hold.What followed was an experience that finally forced me to deal with issues about my body that I had tried to ignore for decades. Along the way I dealt with a physician who gave me ridiculous advice and acquaintances who asked unbelievable questions. But I was also fortunate to be surrounded by people who supported me and doctors who helped me through the process.

    

    This book is a selection of the best columns written by him over the last eleven years.The columns range from the author's perceptive portraits of politicians and celebrities to his reflections on the state of the media and the peculiarities of the English language. He also turns the gaze on himself—sharing with us his eccentricities, his foibles and anecdotes about himself and his family, including his late wife Nisha. There are also pieces here about his Doon and Cambridge days and vignettes from his travels to cities near and far.

    It's a world without rules, where the value of money changes by the day, rumors and gossip are everywhere, and tragedy is a constant backdrop. Yet there are weddings nearly every day in Za'atari, the crowded, dusty camp in the Jordanian desert, where some 120,000 Syrians have come after fleeing the chaos that has consumed their homeland. "A Syrian Wedding" tells the true story of Mohammad and Amneh, a young couple who are navigating this treacherous landscape as they try to prepare for what should be the happiest day of their lives. Middle East reporter Nicholas Seeley offers readers an inside look at the terrible challenges and tiny joys of people displaced by violence and conflict.

    Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized. Michael O’Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, here takes a comprehensive look at the feature of Camelot that remained largely under the radar during the White House years: Kennedy’s womanizing. Indeed, O’Brien writes, Kennedy’s approach to women and sex was near pathological, beyond the farthest reaches of the media’s imagination at the time. The record makes for an astonishing piece of presidential history.---Michael O’Brien was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a Ph.D. in history. He is the author of the widely praised John F. Kennedy: A Biography, a full-scale study based on eleven years’ research into letters, diaries, financial papers, medical records, manuscripts, and oral histories; and a concise analytical life of the president, Rethinking Kennedy. He is now emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley, and lives in Door County, Wisconsin.

    Unsettled explores racism, ableism, abuse and resistance as well as the bonds of community, family and friendship. As an Irish Traveller writing from a feminist perspective, McDonagh’s essays are rich and complex, raw and honest, and, above all else, uncompromising.Praise for UnsettledDon’t read this memoir in sorrow and outrage, read it because Rosaleen McDonagh is so proud, smart and ingenious, she will make you feel more properly alive. Beautifully written, this book beats back the darkness. It brings us all further on. — Anne EnrightMoving and eloquent, this collection is both the story of one woman’s life and a work of profound literary activism. — Emilie PineRosaleen’s story is her story. It’s a very important story and she has a right to tell it. Rosaleen demonstrates, contrary to some settled people’s opinion, that our community is matriarchal, our mothers are so resourceful, and we are not victims. The book is a testimony to the importance of identity and belonging. — Anne BurkeLike James Baldwin before her, this work is a ferociously honest exploration of the intricacies of racism, identity, sexuality, disability, grief, sensuality and marginalisation. It is also a beautiful piece of prose; honest and difficult and deeply moving. This book sees Rosaleen McDonagh masterfully taking all the parts of her life and fitting them together brilliantly for us. A must read. — Mark O’HalloranEmotive, honest and raw. Rosaleen McDonagh takes us on a journey of self acceptance, a journey that sees her face challenging obstacles and setbacks; as well as meeting friends and allies who help her to carve out a place in which she belongs. Unsettled is not only the recount of personal experiences but an authentic glimpse of Traveller life and culture as well as Rosaleen’s very sense of identity. — Michael Power

    The Thumpin’ is the story of that historic victory and the man at the center on whom Democratic hopes hinged: Congressman Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Chicago Tribune reporter Naftali Bendavid had exclusive access to Emanuel and the DCCC in the year and a half leading up to the elections and ended up with the story of a lifetime, the thrilling blow-by-blow account of how Emanuel remade the campaign in his own ferocious image. Responsible for everything from handpicking Congressional candidates to raising money for attack ads, Emanuel, a talented ballet dancer better known in Washington for his extraordinary intensity and his inexhaustible torrents of profanity, threw out the playbook on the way Democrats run elections.Instead of rallying the base, Rahm sought moderate-to-conservative candidates who could attract more traditional voters. Instead of getting caught in the Democrats’ endless arguments about their positions, he went on the attack, personally vilifying Republicans from Tom DeLay to Christopher Shays. And instead of abiding by the gentlemen’s agreements of good-old-boy Washington, he broke them, attacking his counterpart in the Republican party and challenging Howard Dean, the chairman of his own party. In 2005, no one believed victory was within the Democrats’ grasp. But as the months passed, Republicans were caught in wave after wave of scandal, support for the war in Iraq steadily declined, and the president’s poll numbers plummeted. And in Emanuel, the Democrats finally had a killer, a ruthless closer like Karl Rove or Lee Atwater, poised to seize the advantage and deliver what President Bush would call “a thumpin.’”Taking its cues from classic political page-turners like Showdown at Gucci Gulch and documentaries like The War Room, The Thumpin’ takes us inside the key races and the national strategy-making that moved the Democrats from forecasted gains of three seats in 2005 to a sweeping gain of thirty seats when the votes were finally counted. Through this masterful account of Rahm’s rout, Bendavid shows how the lessons the Democrats learned in 2006—to fight for every vote, to abandon litmus tests, and to take no prisoners—will be crucial to the party’s future electoral success, and shape the political course the nation will take in the twenty-first century.From the Hardcover edition.

    Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what—and the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners and who do you have left? The people who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully and you’ll find common themes around their path to the top. This book exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail. You’ll learn about personal strategies for identifying high-payoff activities and gain insight into being more effective as an individual contributor, manager and leader. You will learn how to identify and interact with the right set of career mentors and role models. Being successful doesn’t have to be an accident. Read this book and learn how to succeed on purpose.

    Then her life was irreversibly transformed—and so was her philosophy. In this wholly unexpected personal account, the author of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century (2009) offers us a Vindication of Life as inspiring as it is heartbreaking. The story of Cristina and her little daughter, Eurydice, is a tale of redemption and self-reinvention. It is about expanding definitions of love--and it is about confronting death. Not least, it speaks to us of life’s sweeping ironies: Sometimes bad luck is the new good luck, and the realization of your worst fears may be the greatest gift you can receive.Biography: Nehring first acquired national attention through her fiery criticism in the pages of Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Book Review. A "compassionate contrarian," she won many awards for her politically incorrect cultural and literary essays. Her first book, A Vindication of Love (Harper Collins, 2009) argues for a bolder, braver, wilder form of modern loving, drawing extensively on literary and historical analysis. It was published to wide acclaim and translated into several languages. Nehring also works as a travel writer for Condé Nast Traveler, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in Paris and Los Angeles.

    Each year, the series editor and guest editor curate a truly exceptional collection. The only shared traits among all these diverse styles, voices, and stories are the extraordinarily high caliber of writing, and the pure passion they tap into that can only come from sports.

    NO dissects 45 deceptive affairs including Rebellion, The Sexes, Individuality, Equality, Peace, The Nazis, and Keeping It Real, all brought to light in a fashion that only Boyd Rice can. If past written collections of his work serve as time-capsuled history, let NO be the words of the future.Debossed paperback.

    Williams destroys a number of prevailing social myths and explains why the nature of congressmen is not to act in the national interest.

    It looked like something out of a movie--and, in a way, it was. The ship was the Bounty, a replica of a British merchant vessel of the same name whose crew famously mutinied in 1789. She had been built for a Marlon Brando film in the 1960s--and now she was sinking, her sixteen-person crew fleeing into the sea amid the splintered wood and torn canvas. Was the Bounty's sinking--which left her captain missing and one of her crew members dead--an unavoidable tragedy? Or was it the fault of a captain who was willing to risk everything to save the ship he loved? Drawing on exclusive interviews with Bounty survivors and Coast Guard rescuers, journalist Matthew Shaer reconstructs the ship's final voyage and the Coast Guard investigation into her sinking that followed, uncovering a riveting story of heroism and hubris in the eye of a hurricane. Praise for The Sinking of the Bounty:"Matthew Shaer masterfully recreates the last voyage and final doom of the Bounty, an iconic ship that collided with an historic storm off the Carolina coast. Shaer pulls you off the page and onto the Bounty itself--and then into the roiling sea--to relive a long night of terror, heroism and desperate quests for survival. The Sinking of the Bounty is a classic of the genre, beautifully told and riveting to read."—Sean Flynn, GQ correspondent and author of 3000 Degrees: The True Story of a Deadly Fire and the Men Who Fought It"Few images of Hurricane Sandy's destruction were as indelible, or as surreal, as the shattered wreck of the Bounty sinking beneath the waves of the 'Graveyard of the Atlantic.' Matthew Shaer's The Sinking of the Bounty is a powerful and riveting account of the disaster: the fateful decision to set sail before the storm, the crew's epic struggle to save the ship and then themselves, and the heroic rescue launched by the Coast Guard in the middle of the largest storm the Atlantic has ever seen. In the tradition of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, this is fast-paced and deeply reported storytelling."—Matthew Power, contributing editor, Harper's

    Helping to bring these forgotten figures into the light, Andrew Gimson's illuminating accounts are accompanied by sketches from Guardian sartirical cartoonist, Martin Rowson, making this the perfect gift for all lovers of history and politics.

    An entertaining, insightful history of the men who've held the office, from the division between Jefferson and Hamilton through Bill Clinton's campaign for national health care.