Julia Fox Garrison refused to listen to the professionals she called Dr. Jerk and Dr. Panic, who after she suffered a massive, debilitating stroke at age thirty-seven told her she'd probably die, or to Nurse Doom, who ignored her emergency call button. Instead she heeded the advice of kind, gifted Dr. Neuro, who promised her he would "treat your mind as well as your body." Julia figured if she could somehow manage to get herself into a wheelchair, at least she'd always find parking. But after many, many months of hospitalization and rehab with the help of family, friends, and her own indomitable spirit Julia not only got into a wheelchair, but she got back out.Don't Leave Me This Way is the funny, inspiring, profoundly moving true story of a woman's fight for her life and dignity and her determined quest to awaken an entrenched, unfeeling medical community to the fact that there's always a human being inside every patient.

A powerful, lyrical memoir of self-discovery full of warmth and wry humor a book that combines the soul-baring insight of Wild, the profound wisdom of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the ad venturous spirit of Eat, Pray, Love When her college-bound daughter leaves home, Lynn Darling, widowed more than a decade earlier, finds herself alone and utterly lost. Freed of her parental responsibilities, she has no idea what she wants or even who she is. Searching for answers, she leaves her apartment in New York City and moves to a cranky little house in the middle of the Vermont woods, her only companions, a new dog and a compass. There she hopes to develop a sense of direction both in the woods and in her life.As she finds new ways to get lost in her own backyard, Darling meditates on her past and on the challenges that aging poses to love, work not to mention fashion and the way she sees herself. She has just begun to chart a new course for the future when an unexpected setback unsettles her newfound balance.With rare insight and remarkable honesty, Out of the Woods reveals how honing the skills of navigation literal and metaphorical smoothed one woman's path through the uneven course of life. It is a story at once universal and deeply personal in the words of writer Geraldine Brooks, both a compass and a manifesto for navigating the often-treacherous switchbacks of the second half of life.

Do you believe in the freedom of individuals to determine their own future and solve problems cooperatively?Don't hurt people, and don't take their stuff. Simple and straightforward, that's liberty in a nutshell no assembly required.And yet it seems like, more and more, the decisions Washington makes about what to do for us, or to us, or even against us, are having an increasingly adverse impact on our lives. Young people can't find jobs, millions of Americans are losing the health care plans they were promised they could keep, and every one of us is somehow being targeted, monitored, snooped on, con*ed, induced, taxed, subsidized, regulated, or otherwise manipulated by someone else's agenda, based on someone else's decisions made in some secret meeting or closed-door legislative deal.What givesOur government is out of control. But setting things right again requires that you step up and take your freedom back.From Matt Kibbe, the influential leader of Freedom Works, Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff is the first true manifesto of a new libertarian grassroots movement. As political powermongers and crony corporatists in Washington continue to consolidate their control and infringe on our most fundamental liberties, Kibbe makes the libertarian case for freer people, more voluntary cooperation, and solving problems from the bottom up. He calls out the tyranny of faceless bureaucrats with too much power and discretion, laying out a clear road map for restoring liberty. A witty yet piercing critique of government's expanding control over you and your future, Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff is a vital read for all those who cherish personal liberty and the unalienable right to choose your own path in life.

True stories are more bizarre than any fiction, and Dr. Gary Small knows this best. After thirty distinguished years of psychiatry and groundbreaking research on the human brain, Dr. Small has seen it all now he is ready to open his office doors for the first time and tell all about the most mysterious, intriguing, and bizarre patients of his career. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head is a spellbinding record of the doctor's most bewildering cases, from naked headstands and hysterical blindness to fainting schoolgirls and self-amputations. It is an illuminating journey into the mind of a practicing psychiatrist and his life in medicine as it evolves over time a behind-the-scenes look at the field and a variety of mental diseases as they've never been seen or diagnosed before. You'll find yourself exploring the puzzling eccentricities that make us human.Often funny, sometimes tragic, and always compelling, Dr. Small takes you on a tour of his career that moves from the halls of a crowded inner-city Boston emergency room to the multimillion-dollar ski lodges of the nation's elite. In between, Dr. Small introduces a strange cast of true-life characters and conditions, while dealing with mysterious hysterical blindness, a man convinced that his penis is shrinking, secret double lives, and frighteningly psychotic romantic desires. His career and personal life come full circle when his own mentor becomes his patient, making Small realize that no one is beyond mental exploration not even himself.

From Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton, Scorpion Tongues is a popular history of gossip in American politics. Complete with wickedly delightful anecdotes of major and minor politicians and entertainers over the last 200 years, Gail Collins examines the evolving relationship between politicians and the press and the blurring of the lines between politicians and celebrities. Supported by extensive research and written with an entertaining flair, she speculates on how gossip reflects the current moral compass of the time, noting how a rumor, like an unpredictable summer tornado, can flatten one reputation while a similar story passes over another with hardly a rustle. "Hilariously readable" (The Economist), Scorpion Tongues offers sinful scandals and mild hearsay for every taste.

Psychic medium Concetta Bertoldi knows how it is: Heaven is perfection. Life on Earth is the tough part.It's here we need to meet challenges, learn lessons, and grow spiritually even as we cope with our sense of "aloneness" and "not enough-ness" or the loss of a loved one. Through all of this our guardian angels, those who have crossed to the Other Side or "the dead guys," as Concetta calls them offer us loving, behind-the-scenes assistance.In Inside the Other Side, Concetta explains the importance of the agreements we make with God before being born into a new physical life. She gives advice on dealing with life's difficult issues: from relationships to a lack of abundance, from illness and aging to coping with loss. Concetta's wise, witty, and uplifting assistance will help you get more in touch with the Other Side so that you can call on your own angels whenever they are needed the most.

Scott Bolzan went to work on December 17, 2008, like any other Wednesday. By that afternoon, he'd lost every memory of his past. Awakening in a hospital with no memory of who he was or how he got there, the forty-six-year-old didn't know that the petite blonde at his side was his wife of twenty-four years, Joan or even what a wife was. He couldn't remember the births of his two young-adult children, the daughter he'd lost, his time as an offensive lineman for the NFLs Cleveland Browns, or his flourishing aviation career. Scott's life and the lives of everyone who loved him were forever changed when he slipped, hit his head, and lost consciousness in his office bathroom, suffering one of the most severe cases of permanent retrograde amnesia on record. With heartrending honesty and no shortage of humor, the Bolzans share their remarkable journey as Scott navigates his way through a now-unfamiliar world. The challenges are initially overwhelming: Scotts debilitating headaches, his relearning of social etiquette (taking cues from The Sopranos!), Joans grief over the loss of the man she married and their shared history, the financial burden of Scotts lost income, his mounting medical bills, and the agony of their twenty-year-old son's struggles with drug addiction. But remarkably, My Life, Deleted is above all else a celebration of extraordinary perseverance, and of the enduring love that emerges when we are most tested. Scott learns to trust his intuition in a way few people ever will, while Joan taps into a well of patience and resourcefulness she didn't know she had. Throughout it all, what unfolds against all odds is an enviable romance as Scott and Joan fall in love all over again.Both gut-wrenching and brimming with optimism, the Bolzans captivating story makes a powerful statement about commitment and the possibility of finding extraordinary opportunity in life's greatest challenges.

An irresistible nighttime tour of Paris, past and present, by the bestselling author of The Most Beautiful Walk in the World Every guidebook to Paris is crammed with sites to see during the day, but visitors are often cast adrift once the sun sets and the Louvre, Notre Dame, and other tourist attractions shut their doors. Sadly for those who have retreated into their hotel rooms, it's only when darkness falls that the City of Light shines brightest. Full of as many unexpected detours and delightful digressions as the city itself, award-winning author John Baxter's Five Nights in Paris is the ultimate off-the-beaten-path guide to exploring the French capital after hours. Baxter leads readers on five evening tours across Paris's great neighborhoods. Each night's itinerary is selected for its connection to one of the five senses: the first, "Sound," explores the great jazz clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; "Taste" samples the eclectic restaurants and bakeries of the Marais; "Touch" brings alive the city's legendary cabaret scene, including Montmartre's nearby Moulin Rouge; "Smell" describes Parisians' love of perfume and takes us to the infamous former opium fumeries along the Bois de Boulogne; and "Sight" traces the favorite haunts of the Surrealist artists, beginning in Montparnasse.

A timeless statement about human foibles . . . and human endurance, this beautiful new edition features Wilder's unpublished production notes, diary entries, and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.Time magazine called The Skin of Our Teeth "a sort of Hellzapoppin' with brains," as it broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire (among other styles), Thornton Wilder departs from his studied use of nostalgia and sentiment in Our Town to have an Eternal Family narrowly escape one disaster after another, from ancient times to the present. Meet George and Maggie Antrobus (married only 5,000 years); their two children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in every way!); and their maid, Sabina (the ageless vamp) as they overcome ice, flood, and war -- by the skin of their teeth.

From the perspective of 2007, the unintentional irony of Chance's boast is manifest these days, the question is when will the Cubs ever win a game they have to have. In October 1908, though, no one would have laughed: The Cubs were, without doubt, baseball's greatest team the first dynasty of the 20th century.Crazy '08 recounts the 1908 season the year when Peerless Leader Frank Chance's men went toe to toe to toe with John McGraw and Christy Mathewson's New York Giants and Honus Wagner's Pittsburgh Pirates in the greatest pennant race the National League has ever seen. The American League has its own three-cornered pennant fight, and players like Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and the egregiously crooked Hal Chase ensured that the junior circuit had its moments. But it was the National League's and the Cubs' year. Crazy '08, however, is not just the exciting story of a great season. It is also about the forces that created modern baseball, and the America that produced it. In 1908, crooked pols run Chicago's First Ward, and gambling magnates control the Yankees. Fans regularly invade the field to do handstands or argue with the umps; others shoot guns from rickety grandstands prone to burning. There are anarchists on the loose and racial killings in the town that made Lincoln. On the flimsiest of pretexts, General Abner Doubleday becomes a symbol of Americanism, and baseball's own anthem, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," is a hit. Picaresque and dramatic, 1908 is a season in which so many weird and wonderful things happen that it is somehow unsurprising that a hairpiece, a swarm of gnats, a sudden bout of lumbago, and a disaster down in the mines all play a role in its outcome. And sometimes the events are not so wonderful at all. There are several deaths by baseball, and the shadow of corruption creeps closer to the heart of baseball the honesty of the game itself. Simply put, 1908 is the year that baseball grew up.Oh, and it was the last time the Cubs won the World Series.Destined to be as memorable as the season it documents, Crazy '08 sets a new standard for what a book about baseball can be.

At seven o'clock on the morning of April 14, 1865, President Lincoln came out of his bedroom, nodded to the night guard, and started down the hall to his office. At 7:22 the following morning Surgeon General Barnes pressed silver coins to his eyelids.The president's day was, as usual, crammed with meetings and appointments, but he was probably no busier than John Wilkes Booth, the man who would stand behind him at Ford's Theatre that evening. Although the plan had been long in the making, the time and place were not set until eleven that morning.The Day Lincoln Was Shot chronicles the movements of these two men minute by minute until the almost unbearable suspense is shattered with a single gunshot and a leap to the stage. From a thousand bits and scraps of information, Jim Bishop has fashioned an unforgettable tale of tragedy, more gripping than fiction, more alive than any newspaper account.

The first volume of the Starseed Trilogy: Intuitive knowledge featuring a startling new view of human evolution.

By twenty-one, Jeff Henderson was making up to $35,000 a week cooking and selling crack cocaine. By twenty-four, he had been sentenced to nineteen and a half years in prison on federal drug trafficking charges. It was an all-too-familiar story for a young man raised on the streets of South Central LA. But what happened next wasn't.Once inside prison, Jeff Henderson worked his way up from dishwasher to chief prison cook, and when he was released in 1996, he had found his passion and his dream he would become a professional chef. Barely five years out of federal prison, he was on his way to becoming an executive chef, as well as being a sought-after public speaker on human potential and a dedicated mentor to at-risk youth. A window into the streets and the fast-paced kitchens of world-renowned restaurants, Cooked is a very human story with a powerful message of commitment, redemption, and change.

In American on Purpose, Craig Ferguson delivers a moving and achingly funny memoir of living the American dream as he journeys from the mean streets of Glasgow, Scotland, to the comedic promised land of Hollywood. Along the way he stumbles through several attempts to make his mark as a punk rock musician, a construction worker, a bouncer, and, tragically, a modern dancer. To numb the pain of failure, Ferguson found comfort in drugs and alcohol, addictions that eventually led to an aborted suicide attempt. (He forgot to do it when someone offered him a glass of sherry.) But his story has a happy ending: in 1993, the washed-up Ferguson washed up in the United States. Finally sober, Ferguson landed a breakthrough part on the hit sitcom The Drew Carey Show, a success that eventually led to his role as the host of CBS's The Late Late Show. By far Ferguson's greatest triumph was his decision to become a U.S. citizen, a milestone he achieved in early 2008, just before his command performance for the president at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. In American on Purpose, Craig Ferguson talks a red, white, and blue streak about everything our Founding Fathers feared.

In June 1942, Anne Frank received a red-and-white- checked diary for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in an Amsterdam attic to escape the Nazis. For two years, with ever-increasing maturity, Anne crafted a memoir that has become one of the most compelling documents of modern history. She described life in vivid, unforgettable detail, explored apparently irreconcilable views of human nature people are good at heart but capable of unimaginable evil and grappled with the unfolding events of World War II, until the hidden attic was raided in August 1944.But Anne Frank's diary, argues Francine Prose, is as much a work of art as a historical record. Through close reading, she marvels at the teenage Frank's skillfully natural narrative voice, at her finely tuned dialogue and ability to turn living people into characters. And Prose addresses what few of the diary's millions of readers may know: this book is a deliberate work of art. During her last months in hiding, Anne Frank furiously revised and edited her work, crafting a piece of literature that she had hoped would be read by the public after the war.Read it has been. Few books have been as influential for as long, and Prose thoroughly investigates the diary's unique afterlife: the obstacles and criticism Otto Frank faced in publishing his daughter's words; the controversy surrounding the diary's Broadway and film adaptations; and the claims of conspiracy theorists who have cried fraud, along with the scientific analysis that proved them wrong. Finally, Prose, a teacher herself, considers the rewards and challenges of sharing one of the world's most read, and most banned, books with students.How has the life and death of one girl become emblematic of the lives and deaths of so many, and why do her words continue to inspireAnne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world. Along the way, Francine Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was not an accidental author or a casual teenaged chronicler, but a writer of prodigious talent and ambition.How has the life and death of one girl become emblematic of the lives and deaths of so many, and why do her words continue to inspireAnne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife tells the extraordinary story of the book that became a force in the world. Along the way, Francine Prose definitively establishes that Anne Frank was not an accidental author or a casual teenage chronicler, but a writer of prodigious talent and ambition.

The first-ever inside look at DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the maverick and controversial group whose futuristic work has had amazing civilian and military applications, from the Internet to GPS to driverless cars America's greatest idea factory isn't Bell Labs, Silicon Valley, or MIT's Media Lab. It's the secretive, Pentagon-led agency known as DARPA. Founded by Eisenhower in response to Sputnik and the Soviet space program, DARPA mixes military officers with sneaker-wearing scientists, seeking paradigm-shifting ideas in varied fields from energy, robotics, and rockets to peopleless operating rooms, driverless cars, and planes that can fly halfway around the world in just hours. DARPA gave birth to the Internet, GPS, and mind-controlled robotic arms. Its geniuses define future technology for the military and the rest of us.Michael Belfiore was given unprecedented access to write this first-ever popular account of DARPA. Visiting research sites across the country, he watched scientists in action and talked to the creative, fearlessly ambitious visionaries working for and with DARPA. Much of DARPA's work is classified, and this book is full of material that has barely been reported in the general media. In fact, DARPA estimates that only 2 percent of Americans know much of anything about the agency. This fascinating read demonstrates that DARPA isn't so much frightening as it is inspiring it is our future.

In March 2007, twenty-four hours after Mary Weiland dragged her husband Scott's pricey rock-star wardrobe onto their driveway and torched it, she was locked up in a mental hospital. Watching all this were her frightened extended family, a conflicted husband wrestling with demons of his own, and a tabloid industry gone gleeful at the "Bonfire in Toluca Lake!"To the outside world, Weiland had led what seemed to be an enviable life. A successful international model in the nineties, she married her longtime sweetheart famed lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots and, later, Velvet Revolver, Scott Weiland in 2000. Mary was the sane one, went the story it was the tempestuous, unpredictable Scott who was crazy. In her gripping memoir Fall to Pieces, Mary Weiland reveals that the truth is somewhere in between.From her earliest days in San Diego, Weiland displayed signs of trouble: a black depression that sometimes left her immobile for days, a temper that sent her into wild rages she didn't understand, an overdose. But her fierce determination to "have more" led to early success as a model. At sixteen, she fell in love at first sight with Scott Weiland, then an aspiring musician who was hired to drive her to and from modeling gigs. Slowly, her casual relationship with beer and pot grew into an affair with cocaine and heroin that rivaled her love for Scott, who was addicted as well. From rehab to rehab, from breakup to reconciliation to eventual marriage, the couple fought their way back, welcomed the babies they'd dreamed of, and hoped their struggles were behind them. Then came the bonfire breakdown and the full onset of Mary's bipolar disorder, a widely misunderstood and misdiagnosed mental illness that affects more than five million Americans and had been, in fact, stalking Mary Weiland since her teens.With refreshing candor, innate comic timing, and earned wisdom, Weiland recounts the extreme highs and lows of her life, including an unforgettable love affair with the man she always knew she'd marry, the careers and rock tours that took them around the world, and her fight to finally come to grips with the addictions that could have killed her. In her journey to understand and manage her bipolar disorder, she takes the reader on a wild ride into the dark and back into the light.

The face of entertainment has changed radically over the last decade and dangerously so. Stars like Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Amy Winehouse and their media enablers have altered what we consider "normal" behavior. According to addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky and business and entertainment expert Dr. S. Mark Young, a high proportion of celebrities suffer from traits associated with clinical narcissism vanity, exhibitionism, entitlement, exploitativeness and the rest of us, especially young people, are mirroring what we witness nightly on our TV and computer screens. A provocative, eye-opening study, The Mirror Effect sounds a timely warning, raising important questions about our changing culture and provides insights for parents, young people, and anyone who wonders what the cult of celebrity is really doing to America.

Mary Karr describes herself as a black-belt sinner, and this -- her fourth collection of poems --traces her improbable journey from the inferno of a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism. Not since Saint Augustine wrote "Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet!" has anyone brought such smart-assed hilarity to a conversion story.Karr's battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, friends' deaths, a teenage son's leaving home) as well as in elegies for a complicated mother. The poems disarm with the arresting humor familiar to readers of her memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry. An illuminating cycle of spiritual poems have roots in Karr's eight-month tutelage in Jesuit prayer practice, and as an afterword, her celebrated essay on faith weaves the tale of how the language of poetry, which relieved her suffering so young, eventually became the language of prayer. Those of us who fret that poetry denies consolation will find clear-eyed joy in this collection.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime . . . For American ex-pat writer Poke Rafferty, a late-night poker game delivers an unexpected prize: an "opportunity" to write the biography of Khun Pan, a flamboyant, vulgar, self-made billionaire with a criminal past and far-reaching political ambitions. The win seems like a stroke of luck, but as with so many things in vibrant, seductive, contradictory Bangkok—a city of innocence and evil, power and poverty—the allure of appearances masks something much darker. Within a few hours of folding his cards, Rafferty, his wife, Rose, beloved ?adopted daughter, Miaow, and best friend, Arthit, an honest Bangkok cop, have become pawns in a political struggle among some of Thailand's richest, most powerful, and most ruthless people. A hero to the poor and dispossessed, Pan is like a bone in the throats of the beautiful, sophisticated "good" people who own and control every facet of Thailand and want more. There are many who would prefer that a book, especially a sympathetic book, stay unwritten. And there are others who want to expose Pan's darker secrets, information useful in a preemptive strike against this profligate billionaire who can threaten their hold on power—a situation they will go to murderous lengths to prevent. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, Rafferty is breathing water and sinking deeper in a sea of intrigue with each passing hour. The trouble multiplies when a missing young street friend of Miaow's reappears, needing Rafferty's help to protect an innocent village girl trapped in a baby-selling ring. Pushed ever closer to the abyss, Rafferty has one chance to get them all out alive. But to succeed, this foreigner must do the impossible—keep a cool Thai heart.Set in the Thailand of today's headlines—a nation of unrest, political uncertainty, corruption, and tradition, where the future looks dangerously precarious—Breathing Water is the story of a deadly game in which the stakes are enormous and life is literally cheap. The most compelling Poke Rafferty thriller yet, it is a journey that goes beyond the illusion of order and stability into a world where a wrong turn can lead to chaos, and where love and courage may not be enough to hold back the darkness.

No one breaks out of the brutal convict labor camp at Five Shadows—but Corey Bowen is ready to die trying. They framed him to put him in there, and beat him bloody and nearly dead after his last escape attempt. He'll have help this time—from a lady with murder on her mind and a debt to pay back. Because freedom isn't enough for primed dynamite like Bowen. And he won't leave the corrupt desert hell behind him until a few scores are settled...permanently.