Book picks similar to
Best Garden Plants for Illinois by William Aldrich
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non-fiction
If You Ain't a Pilot...
Ray Wright - 2016
Though competing against one another for the flying assignments of their dreams, like the fearsome F-15 and F-16 fighters, a good mission sometimes takes a backseat to a good party or punch line in this classroom of cut-ups. The high stakes, however, loom over Lt. Wright. In a program where one out of three students fails, not everybody who starts UPT will finish it. And not everybody who does finish will get a desirable flying assignment. Some won’t even escape the Columbus Air Force Base. Will Lt. Wright get his dream assignment flying a C-141 cargo plane based out of beachside Charleston, South Carolina? Or be forced to perpetuate the If you ain’t a pilot… system as the dreaded FAIP (First Assignment Instructor Pilot) in Columbus, Mississippi? Though a military memoir, IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT… is a story of youthful innocence, a happy tale of the best of friends. Beneath the story’s surface layer of how an Air Force officer’s aeronautical rating determines his worth, similar thematic layers unfold around gender, race, and other ways people define each other. At its core, this story is about people, our relationships, and how we choose to treat each other. While 30 years have passed since the memoir’s events—and our aircraft, our enemy, and our pop-culture ties have changed—we still struggle with our differences. IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT taps into the mystic of Top Gun, the satirical wryness of Candide and Catch-22, and the allure of the air-travel genre captured by Mark Vanhoenacker’s recent Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (2015), Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, and James Salter’s The Hunters. Set at the end of the Cold War in the heart of Dixie, IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT…crosses Top Gun adrenaline with Pee-Wee’s Playhouse antics at a flight training base where Air Force idealism collides with Deep South heritage. Complete at 142,000 words, this comedic memoir written for a general audience charts the year when a newly commissioned officer is challenged not only by flight school but also by the Air Force dictum If you ain’t a pilot, you ain’t $#!+. That said, the primary mission for IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT...is to make readers laugh. While the story is written for a non-military audience, military pilots, civilian pilots, and any person who ever dreamed about flying as a kid will love IF YOU AIN’T A PILOT….
Squeaky Wheels: the Non-friction Adventure from Sea to Shining Sea
Scott Hippe - 2012
As the voyage steams (sweats, rather) eastward from Seattle to New York, he meets a diverse, humorous, and motley bunch of individuals in full support of his spirit of adventure, evidence that one's wildest dreams are in fact worth pursuing. The story is a testament to the power of welcoming the stranger and the good that resides in us all. Read it to laugh, read it to learn, or read it simply to remember that you are human.They say once you start pedaling you can't stop. So buckle your helmet, don spandex if you dare, and get ready for the ride of a lifetime.
Remember! (Translated)
Marcel Scharfstein - 2013
Remember! is an autobiography which recounts Marcel Scharfstein's life experience in the Warsaw Ghetto and in Nazi concentration camps of Poland and Germany during World War II.
How to Pray and Decree
Bill Johnson - 2019
“Many of the breakthroughs in Scripture would not have happened if the people hadn’t declared what God told them to declare.”
In this excerpt from God Is Good by Bill Johnson, prayer and declarations are defined as profound, fundamental elements of the Christian walk toward knowing how good God really is.
Sold in Secret: A mother’s desperate search to find the men who trafficked and killed her daughter
Karen Downes - 2018
Because I would never, ever know peace again.' Charlene Downes was 14 when she went missing in Blackpool's seedy underbelly. Once a happy-go-lucky schoolgirl, she had become a truant - hanging out with the wrong crowd by the takeaway shops and pier. But Charlene's mum, Karen, always knew her typical teenage daughter would come home.Until one day she didn't.Karen has been searching for 15 years, campaigning for the truth of what happened to her daughter. To this day, Karen and her family have no body, no convictions and no answers. Arrests were made and a murder trial took place, but no one has ever been brought to justice.On the 15th anniversary of Charlene's disappearance, Karen shares this heartbreaking account of every parent's worst nightmare.