Did you know that 2 days before the blizzard of 1967 that brought the Midwest to a halt, it was a balmy 65 degrees? Or that Wild Thing by the Troggs kicked the Beatle's Paperback Writer off the top of the pop charts? Or that Gomer Pyle USMC replaced the Dick Van Dyke Show? These details unique to 1966 and 1967 also include the Apollo 1 disaster, what young men did to avoid the draft and Vietnam, and President Johnson's conclusion in 1966 that the Vietnam War had been as good as won. All of this incredible history, accurately researched and woven into this incredible story without a seam, presents a historic backdrop for a powerful tale of survival - and the detemination of a neighborhood filled with beloved nuts and bolts who go beyond the call to save a broken family. And it all begins with these words of a child's lament - When I hear the news I want to jump on the dining room clock and make time go backwards . . . Based on the real life loss of the author's father, Bruce Steinberg brings his passionate tale home as told through the eyes of his oldest brother - a child on the cusp of manhood who does not easily take to wearing the crown of New Man of the House.The moment 12-year-old Jeremy Rosenberg witnesses his father's death, Jeremy loses the world he assumed would last forever. With a young brother expecting their father to yet come home, a sister blaming herself, and a mother falling toward isolation, Jeremy is sent fatherless into the world just as he enters adolescence. Beautifully and memorably set in mid-1960s Chicago suburbia, The Widow's Son is launched on a devastating moment. But this tale of misguided efforts and accidental triumphs of children forced into adult emotions creates a humorous, poignant novel. The reader's laughter and tears are sure to flow together to the last page as Jeremy battles to make his family into a family once again.Author Bruce Steinberg also writes under the name B.R. Robb, and is the author of River Ghosts, a critically acclaimed novel for your review under Amazon.com's Look Inside program.

    The one-act play invites listeners into Sharon's unorthodox childhood, growing up in an apartment on the top floor of the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library, where her father served as the building's custodian. A love of literature and boundless imagination helped the playwright as a young woman persevere over dragons of all forms.Directed by Maria Mileaf, Feeding the Dragon premiered at City Theatre in Pittsburgh and was subsequently produced by Hartford Stage and Primary Stages.©2018 Sharon Washington (P)2018 AO Media, LLC.

    As the storytellers in this book start careers, build homes, and raise families, we witness the life-affirming joy of partnership, the comfort of shared sorrows, and profound gratitude in the face of loss.These stories are also testament to the heart’s remarkable endurance. In ALL THERE IS we encounter love that survives discrimination, illness, poverty, distance—even death. In the courage of people’s passion we are reminded of the strength and resilience of the human spirit. This powerful collection bares witness to real love, in its many varied forms, enriching our understanding of that most magical feeling.

    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

    But suddenly, snobberies he couldn’t even have guessed at are set in motion. It seems Letty’s prominent Jewish parents hate him for being…too Jewish!At first this strikes him only as petty and small-minded, but he has no idea how much hatred his scheming mother-in-law can wring from the situation. She knows, for instance, that he had to leave behind his beloved mother, and she uses his mother’s life and memory as a lever against him, eventually causing him physical and mental problems that threaten his family’s well-being in every possible way and thwart him at every turn.Thus, Bernie and Letty’s daughter Darby is born into the strangest of mixed marriages, torn, as her mother is, between loyalty to her grandparents and to her father. Even she, at her tender age, wonders whether Letty’s love—and her own–can save Bernie from the secret pain and guilt of surviving the Holocaust. And from the machinations of his cruel mother-in-law.This bittersweet love story is told in three novellas, each from the point of view of one member of the Cooper family. From Bernie we learn the immigrant’s story, of a young Jew making it out of Germany just as Hitler invades Poland and Europe shuts down. Speaking little English, he makes his way across America, and he finds Letty in New Orleans. In the second novella, Letty picks up where Bernie leaves off, and we see this is no ordinary rich girl, but rather an unspoiled, curious, generous-spirited young woman who sees Bernie for who he is and falls in love despite all the obstacles thrown up by her parents. When Darby picks up the story in the third novella, everything is in place for a comfortable ending–or a tragedy Darby bears the legacy of her father’s deep sadness and her mother’s need to fit into New Orleans’s peculiar social structure.

    To be published on the first anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new and unpublished writings on war and peace, imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor.

    Like her father, she came to love the Galapagos and to dream of having a life there. Her experience was filled with the perils and incomparable pleasures of living on the Galapagos.

    “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

     At the time of his incarceration, Kitchin, a Finnish citizen, was working in Russia as a representative for an American firm. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police (known as the OGPU at the time), charged with violating an obscure regulation, held in prison, and then sent to a labor camp located in northern Russia where he describes the brutalities he endured and witnessed. He had the good fortune after a time to be assigned clerical work in the office of the penal camp administration. This undoubtedly saved his life and it also gave him a unique opportunity to observe the inner workings of the OGPU organization. As a citizen of Finland, his case was a matter of concern to the Finnish government, whose efforts finally obtained for him permission to leave Soviet Russia. His physical condition after four horrible years was dire. A year and a half were spent in convalescing, and another year in preparing his notes and writing this memoir of his experiences. Prisoner of the OGBU is one of the only first-hand authentic accounts of the penal camps of the Far North, and it is still relevant today in understanding and studying that brutal period of history. ‘This for the market of Escape from the Soviets, and others of the sort, an account of the piled-up horrors of a prison camp of the Soviet Secret Police. Kitchin was a representative of Finnish interests, and got caught on a technicality and sent for four horrible years to the far north. First hand data of Soviet methods and inefficiencies, of the regime and a revealing picture of behind the scenes, of incredible brutalities. Well done and thrillingly absorbing reading.’ – Kirkus Reviews

    As the SS Bremen leaves New York Harbor with Marlies and her family as passengers, Marlies has no idea that what is intended to be a three-month stay will turn into a seven-year struggle to stay alive in a living hell.No one could have predicted the events that are about to unfold as the Bremen docks in Bremerhaven, Germany six days later. As World War II begins, Hitler comes into power, and all borders and ports are closed; the Adams family is prohibited from leaving Germany-now a Nazi-controlled country. In her compelling autobiography, Marlies chronicles a little girl's unforgettable journey through starvation, bone-chilling cold, prejudice, bombings, abuse, homelessness, and fear instigated by an evil dictator.Narrated with candor and many historical details that bring her memoir to life, Marlies shares the tragic yet inspirational story of how she endured a childhood in wartime Germany by relying on her own sheer will, faith, and the unconditional love of a most unusual, yet devoted best friend.

    He was a kid, eighteen years old. Married, broke, flunking out of college-and about to become a father. The Marines seemed like a good way out. He figured the Nam couldn't be any worse than home. He was wrong.Publishers Weekly says "Chilling...It tells how a youngster from Portland, Oregon matured in the crucible of combat...The reader is given a sense of what it's like to fight an unseen enemy who might appear anytime, anywhere and start shooting from ambush." Karl Marlantes, New York Times best selling author of "Matterhorn" calls "A Field of Innocence", "Powerful ...and riveting."Tim O'Brien, New York Times best selling author of "The Things They Carried" says, "With its raw realism and heartbreaking honesty...one of the finest Vietnam memoirs."Kirkus Review says A Field of Innocence is "Exciting and Impressive."

    Some of them, he’s the first to admit, seem unbelievable--like chasing a naked patient around the ER parking lot in the middle of the night . . . or constructing a horse sling for a 700-pound patient . . . or treating a patient who swallowed a cigarette lighter . . . or serving as a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Cold War, on orders of the president and with a KGB agent hot on his tail in the Soviet Union. In his wildest dreams, Dr. Waymack could never have imagined most of what he experienced as a doctor, but these stories are all true. He couldn’t have made them up if he tried.

    Don't, for instance, pass the Fryemont Inn when the windows are open--not unless you plan to come inside and enjoy fresh-baked rolls, gourmet cooking, and an owner who is as warm and inviting as the food. She's just one of the friendly faces you'll meet in Bryson City Secrets.Told with winsome humor and deep affection, Bryson City Secrets is a story-lover's delight, continuing Dr. Walt Larimore's reminiscences of his early years of country medical practice. Pull up a chair and feast on this rich fare of Smoky Mountain personalities, highland wisdom, and all the tears, laughter, tenderness, faith, courage, and misadventures of small-town life.

    Written during this time, this is the account of prison life and the people he encountered.There is the guard who delivers blows with no visible traces. The fraudster stitched up by the police for murder. The man who refuses to lie for a packet of cigarettes. The abandoned teenager, the down-and-out, the grass... He describes a hidden world of brutality and corruption, yet one where moments of humanity still manage to shine through.One in ten Russian men pass through prison at some point in their lives. This book is a denunciation of an entire system of bureaucratic criminality, and a passionate call to recognise a human tragedy.

    Well – sort of close. He ended up in the minor leagues of professional basketball instead, in the storied and now defunct CBA, a league that has turned out a record-setting number of NBA players and coaches, such as Phil Jackson and George Karl. It wasn’t glamorous, in fact the playing conditions in the CBA were pretty grim; near-empty arenas, interminable bus rides to nowheresville, oddball coaches, little loyalty from management, meager pay, these were a few realities of CBA life. And yet, even as it chipped away at your dignity and made little economic sense to remain, the CBA drew you in with the allure of action and the prospect of an NBA call-up. And it could inspire, like when you and your teammates caught a rhythm that made you remember why basketball is such a beautiful game, or when you saw guys continue to strive, to persevere, even if their dreams weren't fully realized.Carson writes honestly, hilariously and often touchingly of his running and gunning days as a CBA also-ran, with flash backs to his college days where the future seemed brighter than a new pair of Nikes. A top recruit with superior ballhanding and shooting skills along with a sixth basketball sense, in 1997 Carson was a Sporting News All-American freshman who broke Gary Payton's freshman scoring record and a few years later helped his team at Purdue get within a game of the Final Four.