Brittany asked me to do the video with her, to support her. The first words my daughter uttered on the film were, “The thoughts that go through your mind when you find out you have so little time is everything you need to say to everyone that you love.” Wearing a simple black sweater, her face already rounded and puffy from taking prescribed steroids, her once waist-length hair now grazing her shoulders after a craniotomy, Brittany described why she was choosing to end her life by her own hand rather than waiting for her brain tumor to rob her of everything that defined who she was. In this poignant, powerful book, Deborah Ziegler makes good on the promise she made to her only child: that she would honor her daughter and carry forward her legacy by sharing their story and offering hope, empowerment, and inspiration to the growing tens of millions of people who are struggling with end-of-life issues.Wild and Precious Life is not a book about death, however. Instead, it is a book about a life well-lived. What emerges in this compassionate and lyrical text is an unforgettable story of how, while we can’t control the hand fate delivers, we can decide how we play it. It is also a thoughtful exploration of America’s ongoing struggle with end-of-life issues and most importantly, a touching tribute to the enduring power of a mother and daughter’s love.

     Last King of the Cross lays bare Australia's most notorious underworld figure.In the mongrel tongue of the streets, John writes of fleeing war-torn Tripoli with his family and growing up in Sydney's rough and tumble west - before establishing himself as a tough guy and teen delinquent, then a bouncer, enforcer and nightclub king on the Golden Mile.Bullets fly, blades flash and bodies fall. In a city of shadows, John builds his army and empire - partying like a playboy prince of darkness while staying one step ahead of the cops, the outlaw gangs and hungry triggermen, plotting to take him and his family down.Crazier than Goodfellas, more compelling than The Godfather, Last King of the Cross is a colourful crime saga like no other and powerful proof that truth is always stranger than fiction.

    

    The favour is returned when the scout is saved by the Cheyenne and given mercy, but when he falls in love with the girl he saved he knows that the tribe will never allow them to be together. They escape, but are forced to abandon their flight when they encounter an omen telling them that she is pledged to another. This frontier tale soon becomes a violent present day manhunt through the Wild West. Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection The Veteran.

    There's Walter, newly abandoned by his wife; there's Edith, a fiftyish virgin; there's Bunny, taking care of her mother and her mother's boyfriend; and there's Belle, whose married lover dies in the hallway wearing her dead husband Herb's pajama top. Blindly, they encounter one another in ways the reader recognizes are profound even as the characters themselves are unaware. The genius and the art in this collection derives from the possibility that these ships might actually find each other by daylight. If only these four could get together--they'd be so good for each other. "Written with an expert touch, and a wise and tender sensibility. The effect is subtle, strong, and comic."--Charles Baxter, author of BELIEVERS and BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE; "It's hard to think she is capable of writing anything that isn't immediately engaging and a joy to read. Probably someone should publish her shopping lists."--Elizabeth Berg, author of TALK BEFORE SLEEP. A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB SELECTION

    Through captivating stories and with disarming honesty, Bussie gives concrete, practical strategies to help readers cultivate hope, seek joy, practice accompaniment, compost their pain, and rediscover the spiritual practice of lament. Tackling difficult questions without political divisiveness, Bussie speaks to both progressive and conservative Christians in ways that unite rather than divide. And in doing so, she provides a new way to handle the most difficult and troubling questions of life in a broken world that God will never abandon.

    From scores of insightful interviews with modern priests, exorcists, seminary formators, and even disillusioned laity, Wells here draws forth a blueprint for priestly holiness that can once again fill our Church with priests abounding with sincere, supernatural faith, on fire with God s love, and moved by the irresistible impulse to save souls, no matter the cost to themselves.Reading this book will deepen your own faith and help you understand what all priests, by their vocation, are consecrated and called to be. Giving a copy to your parish priest will help him and encourage him as he strives to become a member of the small but growing contingent of holy priests we need.

    If ‘they’ were to say I was friends with him, how would I deny it? I had very few friends in school, but who would believe that?You can alter your future, but how do you change your past?--19 September 2008, the Batla House encounter. That one day changed the life of a young man from Inderwan Bairam in Bihar’s Gopalganj district. An over-protected childhood in the village, an ambitious migration to Delhi as a young boy for better education, an undisciplined and shiftless adolescence – all of this history is flattened out into one tiny slice of Neyaz Farooquee’s identity: Muslim. From Jamia Nagar. Who lived practically next door to the Terrorists who had been killed in the encounter. A Potential Terrorist himself? How, after all, does a man prove that he is (and not merely pretending to be) a Normal Human Being?Sardonic and wise, Farooquee scrapes out the unvarnished truth about identity and stereotypes, about life in a ghetto, and the small and big disappointments that make up an ordinary life.A necessary book for our troubled times.

    But as it is often said nothing ever really happened unless it is written down. There are so many stories to tell of the agonies and triumphs of both doctors and patients, who have peopled this venerable institution through the ages. I wrote the stories because I firmly believe that healing is a mutual process; that the healer is very often himself healed as he goes about caring for the ailing person. So the stories bite both ways.”

    Nancy worked for Elvis from 1967 until his untimely death in 1977. Read her stories of what those years were like, of what the routines were at Graceland, and what it meant to be close to Elvis and his family on a daily basis. Read the sad account of her rushing upstairs, after a frantic call from Ginger Alden, and finding him on the bathroom floor. This book presents that picture, one that every Elvis fan will want to see."

    In Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary the author traces, in sparse prose, the slow, gradual erosion of her mother's health, her dignity and her life. In seventeen short chapters, from 'anaemia', 'twilight sleep' and 'metastasis', to 'unction', 'cremation' and 'remains', the author describes the family's journey through her mother's illness and death. Written unsentimentally, and with sometimes painful honesty, Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary is an extraordinarily moving commemoration of a life and death.

    What began as the chronicle of an imminent and early death became something much more--a powerful exhortation to the living.That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Born blind in Vietnam, she narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to flee with her family the political upheaval of her country in the late 1970s. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. She would go on to become a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, and a life she had once assumed would be impossible. Then, at age thirty-seven, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began.The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it--a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining. Motherhood, marriage, the immigrant experience, ambition, love, wanderlust, tennis, fortune-tellers, grief, reincarnation, jealousy, comfort, pain, the marvel of the body in full rebellion--this book is as sprawling and majestic as the life it records. It is inspiring and instructive, delightful and shattering. It is a book of indelible moments, seared deep--an incomparable guide to living vividly by facing hard truths consciously.With humor, bracing honesty, and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, Julie Yip-Williams set the stage for her lasting legacy and one final miracle: the story of her life.

    It's about what happens when you let go of everything you think you need and are confronted by who you really are - and how on the other side of this confrontation lies true contentment.

    . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book ReviewQuietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see.Shirt in HeavenCome upon a snapshotof secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches—come upon letters I thought I'd burned—I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs.I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat downin the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried.He yelled at the aide to get out.His two sons had been your students.—me too, little-knowing—Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

    Now, more than thirty years later, he tells the story of how his own government failed him...For give hellish years, American soldier Frank Anton was held as a POW in Vietnam. Subject to disease, starvation, and physical and psychological torture, Anton and his fellow prisoners held out hope that the U.S. government would find and rescue them.When he was finally freed in 1973, Anton returned to the United States bruised and battered. And the most devastating blow of all had yet to even be struck. Upon his release, Anton and debriefed by the government and saw both aerial photographs of the prison camps where he was held and a close-us picture of himself walking the grueling Ho Chi Minh Trail. The government had known all along where and when Anton and his fellow soldiers were being held--and made no attempt to rescue them.now, in this harrowing first-person account and shocking expose, Frank Anton recounts his years as a POW and the aftermath--devoting his life to understanding why and how his own government left him and others to suffer and possibly die in the Vietnamese prison camps. And the answers he's uncovered will forever astound and disturb you.With eight pages of dramatic photosA main selection of the Military Book Club