Marcia! Marcia! Marcia! Marcia Brady, eldest daughter on television's The Brady Bunch, had it all style, looks, boys, brains, and talent. No wonder her younger sister Jan was jealous! For countless adolescents across America who came of age in the early 1970s, Marcia was the ideal American teenager. Girls wanted to be her. Boys wanted to date her. But what viewers didn't know about the always-sunny, perfect Marcia was that offscreen, her real-life counterpart, Maureen McCormick, the young actress who portrayed her, was living a very different and not-so-wonderful life. Now, for the very first time, Maureen tells the shocking and inspirational true story of the beloved teen generations have invited into their living rooms and the woman she became.In Here's the Story, Maureen takes us behind the scenes of America's favorite television family, the Bradys. With poignancy and candor, she reveals the lifelong friendships, the hurtful jealousies, the offscreen romance, the loving support her television family provided during a life-or-death moment, and the inconsolable loss of a man who had been a second father. But The Brady Bunch was only the beginning. Haunted by the perfection of her television alter ego, Maureen landed on the dark side, caught up in a fast-paced, drug-fueled, star-studded Hollywood existence that ultimately led to the biggest battle of her life.Moving from drug dens on Wonderland Avenue to wild parties at the Playboy mansion and exotic escapades on the beaches of Hawaii, this candid, hard-hitting memoir exposes a side of a beloved pop-culture icon the paparazzi missed. Yet it is also a story of remarkable success. After kicking her drug habit, Maureen battled depression, reconnected with her mother, whom she nursed through the end of her life, and then found herself in a pitched battle for her family in which she ultimately triumphed.There is no question: Maureen McCormick is a survivor. After fifty years, she has finally learned what it means to love the person you are, insight that has brought her peace in a happy marriage and as a mother. Here's the Story is the empowering, engaging, shocking, and emotional tale of Maureen McCormick's courageous struggle over adversity and her lifelong battle to come to terms with the idea of perfection and herself.

A groundbreaking and inspiring exploration of the unique relationship between dogs and humans, from the bestselling author of Dogs Never Lie About Love Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson has long been interested in the relationships between humans and animals, and he's always been aware that there was something very special in our bond with dogs. No other animals love us in quite the same way as dogs love us. And it is mutual. Is it possible that we developed our capacity for love, sympathy, empathy, and compassion because of our long association with dogs?In The Dog Who Couldn't Stop Loving, Masson considers the far-reaching consequences of the coevolution of dogs and humans, drawing upon recent scientific research. Over the past forty thousand years a collective domestication has occurred that brings us to where we are today humans have formed intense bonds with dogs, and the adoration is almost always reciprocal. Masson himself has experienced a profound bond with his new dog, Benjy, a failed guide dog for the blind, who possesses an abundance of uninhibited love. Masson knows that the love he feels for Benjy the same feeling Benjy has for all the people and animals around him is not unique, but exemplifies a love affair unmatched in the animal world.With wisdom, insight, and a brilliant analysis of recent scientific findings, bestselling author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson delivers a provocative and compelling book that will change the way we think about love and our canine companions.

The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is a guide to the emerging subculture of literary tattoos a collection of more than 150 full-color photographs of human epidermis indelibly adorned with quotations and illustrations from Dickinson to Pynchon, from Shakespeare to Plath. With beloved lines of verse, literary portraits, and illustrations and statements from the bearers on their tattoos' history and the personal significance of the chosen literary work The Word Made Flesh is part collection of photographs and part literary anthology written on skin.

When Scott McKenzie was a young man, he thought he saw God . . .The deity was all in black with knee-high silver boots, a patent-leather breastplate, and full face makeup, clutching a beautiful, custom Les Paul guitar. Ace Frehley, lead guitarist for the rock group KISS, wasn't God but hearing his piercing, shrieking, screaming, outrageous guitar solos was a transcendent spiritual experience for a boy from rural Kentucky, making him feel uplifted, a witness to a higher power.Two decades later, a grown-up Scott McKenzie vowed to meet Ace Frehley in the flesh as well as the other gods and demigods who have held divine power over a generation of worshipful metal fans: legendary guitar champions like Glenn Tipton of Judas Priest and Phil Collen of Def Leppard, hallowed names like Steve Vai, Warren DeMartini, and John 5.Power Chord is a chronicle of Scott McKenzie's epic quest to stand in the presence of metal greatness to meet his omnipotent guitar gods face-to-face and get them to divulge their otherworldly secret.

Prominent feminist author Barbara Walker has revamped, retold, and infused with life some of your favorite classic fairy tales. No longer are women submissive, helpless creatures in need of redemption through the princely male! Instead they are vibrantly alive, strong women who take fate into their own hands.

The California condor has been described as a bird "with one wing in the grave."Flying on wings nearly ten feet wide from tip to tip, these birds thrived on the carcasses of animals like woolly mammoths. Then, as humans began dramatically reshaping North America, the continent's largest flying land bird started disappearing. By the beginning of the twentieth century, extinction seemed inevitable.But small groups of passionate individuals refused to allow the condor to fade away, even as they fought over how and why the bird was to be saved. Scientists, farmers, developers, bird lovers, and government bureaucrats argued bitterly and often, in the process injuring one another and the species they were trying to save. In the late 1980s, the federal government made a wrenching decision -- the last remaining wild condors would be caught and taken to a pair of zoos, where they would be encouraged to breed with other captive condors. Livid critics called the plan a recipe for extinction. After the zoo-based populations soared, the condors were released in the mountains of south-central California, and then into the Grand Canyon, Big Sur, and Baja California. Today the giant birds are nowhere near extinct.The giant bird with "one wing in the grave" appears to be recovering, even as the wildlands it needs keep disappearing. But the story of this bird is more than the story of a vulture with a giant wingspan -- it is also the story of a wild and giant state that has become crowded and small, and of the behind-the-scenes dramas that have shaped the environmental movement. As told by John Nielsen, an environmental journalist and a native Californian, this is a fascinating tale of survival.

From the freewheeling rush of hijacking trucks to the brutal race wars that marked his decade-long stint in jail, former Mafia insider Louis Ferrante describes his remarkable journey from rising mobster to federal prison inmate to full-time writer. As Louis Ferrante tells it, the bottom line was money and his word was good. During his teenage years, Ferrante and his crew members hijacked delivery trucks and drove them to drop-offs all over New York, reselling the merchandise and pocketing thousands of dollars per load. For a seventeen-year-old who liked fist fighting and fast cars, it was the quickest money on the street, and it soon earned Ferrante the attention of the infamous Gambino crime family, led by late Mob boss John Gotti. In the early nineties, Ferrante's growing Mafia connections enabled him to pull off some of the most lucrative heists in American history all by the age of twenty-one.But the same handshakes that once sealed deals soon could no longer be trusted, and the betrayal by several of his close friends brought the feds banging down Ferrante's door. Symptomatic of the nation's larger crackdown on organized crime, indictments came from the Secret Service, the Nassau County Organized Crime Force, and the FBI. By 1994, Ferrante faced a life sentence in prison. He pleaded guilty and would serve nearly a decade in some of the most notorious penitentiaries in America. With raucous violence teeming around him, Ferrante relied on his Mob connections and street smarts to keep him alive until an unexpected exchange with a guard propelled him to a painful self-reckoning: Who am IWhat is it that makes me this wayDo I have a purpose?Desperate to escape from his bleak surroundings, Ferrante immersed himself in the study of history and literature. Over the term of his incarceration, each book became a much-needed sanctuary from the brutal chaos of his everyday existence, each page a challenge to his rapidly expanding knowledge of the world. Ferrante read voraciously a journey of the mind that took him from philosophy and ancient classics to nineteenth-century fiction. He also learned the art of writing and studied the major world religions, eventually deciding to become an Orthodox Jew. And with only limited access to legal texts, Ferrante taught himself enough about the American justice system to successfully appeal his own conviction, in a case that is now cited in courtrooms across the country. Gritty and hard-hitting, Ferrante's memoir recounts his rapid rise to the upper echelons of the Mafia hierarchy, his time in prison, and his struggle to turn his life around. Unlocked is an astonishing journey a true story of personal transformation that is both shocking and unforgettable.

France, 1940. The once glittering boulevards of Paris teem with spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to Hitler's Wermacht. For André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Serge, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the Third Reich, fear and uncertainty define daily life. One wrong glance, one misplaced confidence, could mean arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a ch?teau outside Marseille where a group of young people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive. Financed by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, unlikely heroes—feisty graduate student Miriam Davenport, Harvard-educated classical scholar Varian Fry, beautiful and compelling heiress Mary Jayne Gold, and brilliant young Socialist and survivor of the Battle of Dunkerque Danny Bénédite and his British wife, Theo—cajole, outwit, and use every means possible to stave off the Nazis and newly installed Vichy government officials circling closer with each passing day. The ch?teau was a vibrant artistic salon, home to lively debates and clandestine affairs, to Sunday art auctions and subversive surrealist games. Relationships within the house were tense and arguments were common, but the will to survive kept the covert operation under wraps. Beyond the ch?teau's luscious fa?ade war raged, yet hope reverberated within its halls. With the aid of their young rescuers, this diverse intelligentsia—intense, brilliant, and utterly terrified—was able to survive one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. Villa Air-Bel is a powerfully told, meticulously researched true story. Rosemary Sullivan explores the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the individuals involved while uncovering their private worlds and the web of relationships they developed. Filled with suspense, drama, and intrigue, Villa Air-Bel is an excellent work of narrative nonfiction that delves into a fascinating albeit hidden saga in our recent history.

I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotionsYes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of itIt is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.In this extraordinary book, the 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother, Emily, spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital after her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel.In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war; a story that begins with their meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, of the family's move to Africa, and of the impact of her parents' marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land."Here I still am," says Doris Lessing, "trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Triumphantly, with the publication of Alfred and Emily, she has done just that.

Alaska is a place where know-how is currency and a novice's mistakes can kill you. An extreme landscape in both its beauty and challenges, the state is nicknamed "The Last Frontier" with good reason: Here is a paradoxical landscape where boundaries between community and isolation, bounty and deprivation, conservation and exploitation are constantly in flux.But the state has also always been a place for reinvention, a refuge as much for those desperate to escape something as for those on a quest for something else. In Tide, Feather, Snow, Miranda Weiss, a young woman who grew up landlocked in well-kept East Coast suburbs, moves with her boyfriend to Homer, Alaska, where the days are quartered by the most extreme tides in the country, where the years are marked by seasons of fish, and where locals carry around the knowledge of fish, tides, boats, and weather as ballast. At first, she struggles to make a place for herself in this unfamiliar country. But ultimately, Weiss learns the skills to survive on her own, from setting a fishing net to befriending the locals, from jarring rosehip butter to skinning a sea otter. Weiss's keenly observed prose introduces readers to the memorable people and peculiar beauty of Alaska's vast landscape and takes us on her personal journey of adventure, physical challenge, and culture clash. In the tradition of John McPhee's Coming into the Country, this elegant and affecting memoir is nature writing at its best.

A snarky, fact-filled look at the people and places that made the indie/punk scene what it is today The American underground music scene is exploding everywhere not just in New York City and L.A. (although we've got those cities covered too!): In Washington, D.C. . . . Ian MacKaye and Fugazi inspired the straightedge culture, which had kids everywhere drawing black X's on their hands in magic marker. In Omaha, Nebraska . . . A young Conor Oberst, aka Bright Eyes, started writing and performing gut-wrenching love songs at the tender age of thirteen.On Long Island, New York . . . Taking Back Sunday and Brand New battled for emo supremacy and the fragile hearts of a million teenage girls.From the coauthor of the cult-worthy Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture comes Wish You Were Here a combination travel guide and tortured history covering everything from what constitutes proper rock critic etiquette in Minneapolis to why pop-punk bands in Chicago have so much suburban angst, to how freegans in the Bay Area can feed themselves on a budget that would make frugal Rachael Ray's face blush.

Steven Winn and his wife, Sally, held out for as long as they could. When the San Francisco couple finally gave in to their only child Phoebe's pleas for a dog, they adopted a scraggly terrier mutt from a local animal shelter. The new family pet, Como, turned out to hate men especially the author and proved to be a cunning escape artist. Traumatized, single-minded, and exceptionally clever, Como was bent on breaking Winn's sanity and self-respect, his bank account and his heart. Come Back, Como is the story of one man's hilarious and poignant quest to win the trust of a dog who wanted nothing to do with him. With humor and pathos, Winn describes the maddening but ultimately rewarding effects Como had on his family, the misadventures and ordeals and terrifying events he and his dog endured together, and the greatest lesson Como taught him: that loving a dog can make us more human.

Biologists and laypeople alike have repeatedly claimed victory over life. A thousand years ago we thought we knew almost everything; a hundred years ago, too. But even today, Rob Dunn argues, discoveries we can't yet imagine still await.In a series of vivid portraits of single-minded scientists, Dunn traces the history of human discovery, from the establishment of classification in the eighteenth century to today's attempts to find life in space. The narrative telescopes from a scientist's attempt to find one single thing (a rare ant-emulating beetle species) to another scientist's attempt to find everything in a small patch of jungle in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. With poetry and humor, Dunn reminds readers how tough and exhilarating it is to study the natural world, and why it matters.

On a blustery night in January 2001, detectives from the Massachusetts State Police knocked on Amy Gleason's door. Gleason, along with fellow nurse Kim Hoy, had helped a patient deal with pain and suffering at the end of her life. Now the patient was dead, and the two nurses were being investigated for murder. Both believed they had done the right thing, but they had no idea what it would cost them.What began on that cold night for Gleason and Hoy was an experience that would forever scar them, but for medical professionals everywhere, their situation the death, the investigation, and the aftermath is a by-product of quiet yet forceful ideological battles consuming American hospitals. These are battles over proper medical procedures, battles over the nature of care, and battles over how terminally ill patients should die.In this captivating and powerful true story, Dr. Lewis M. Cohen uses the experiences of Gleason, Hoy, and the nursing assistant who accused them of murder to explore what happens when decisions about end-of-life care shift from the hospital to the courtroom to the church. Cohen goes behind the scenes on both sides of this debate, examining how advances in modern medicine have given us tremendous tools for prolonging life but have also forced us to address how we treat patients who are dying and suffering.Tracing this issue from the uproar over Terri Schiavo's feeding tube to the controversial figure of Jack Kevorkian to the legitimate threat of serial killer medial professionals, Cohen balances the need for criminal justice with the realities of health care, all the while focusing on the human beings the nurses,the doctors, the family members, and, most of all, the patients who must confront the physical and emotional pain of death on a daily basis. What emerges is an evocative portrait of end-of-life care in America, one that takes a hard look at life-and-death decisions but never loses sight of the people who must make them.

The cow. The most industrious animal in the world. A beast central to human existence since time began, it has played a vital role in our history not only as a source of food, but also as a means of labor, an economic resource, an inspiration for art, and even as a religious icon. Prehistoric people painted it on cave walls; explorers, merchants, and landowners traded it as currency; many cultures worshipped it as a god. So how did it come to occupy the sorry state it does today more factory product than animal?In Beef, Andrew Rimas and Evan D. G. Fraser answer that question, telling the story of cattle in its entirety. From the powerful auroch, a now extinct beast once revered as a mystical totem, to the dairy cows of seventeenth-century Holland to the frozen meat patties and growth hormones of today, the authors deliver an engaging panoramic view of the cow's long and colorful history.Peppered with lively anecdotes, recipes, and culinary tidbits, Beef tells a story that spans the globe, from ancient Mediterranean bullfighting rings to the rugged grazing grounds of eighteenth-century England, from the quiet farms of Japan's Kobe beef cows to crowded American stockyards to remote villages in East Africa, home of the Masai, a society to which cattle mean everything. Leaving no stone unturned in its exploration of the cow's legacy, the narrative serves not only as a compelling story but as a call to arms, offering practical solutions for confronting the current condition of the wasteful beef and dairy industries. Beef is a captivating history of an animal whose relationship with humanity has shaped the world as we know it, and readers will never look at steak the same way again.

The First and Only Scientifically Determined Enneagram Personality Test and Guide A centuries-old psychological system with roots in sacred tradition, the Enneagram can be an invaluable guide in your journey toward self-understanding and self-development. In this book, Stanford University Medical School clinical professor of psychiatry David Daniels and counseling psychologist Virginia Price offer the only scientifically developed Enneagram test based upon extensive research combined with a self-discovery and personal-development guide.The most fundamental guide to the Enneagram ever offered, this book features effective self-tests to determine simply and accurately what your personality type is. Daniels and Price provide step-by-step instructions for taking inventory of how you think, what you feel, and what you experience. They then guide you in your discovery of what your type means for your personal well-being and your relationships with others, and they show you how to maximize your inherent strengths. Brimming with empowering information for each of the nine personality types Perfectionist, Giver, Performer, Romantic, Observer, Loyal Skeptic, Epicure, Protector, and Mediator this one-of-a-kind book equips you with all the tools you need to dramatically enhance your quality of life.

With characteristic wit, self effacing charm and sheer, exuberant love of a good cat story, New York Times bestselling author Michael Korda and his wife Margaret Korda recount their lives as "cat people," beginning with Margaret's passion for cats (and Michael's reluctant mid life transformation into a cat person), and introducing readers to a hilarious assortment of people whose life revolves often to an extraordinary degree around their cat, or cats, from Cleopatra a transatlantic traveler who found happiness in Paris to Wally, the epitome of feline dignity. Here are people who just can't say no to another cat, who "world travel" with their cat, who build their social life around their cats and of course the cats themselves, for the Kordas celebrate the beguiling power of cats, including many of their own, who have complemented, complicated and changed their lives together over the years. Here are charming, often hilarious and sometimes sad portraits of such cats as Margaret's beloved Irving, whose favorite abode was the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and Mumsie, who arrived unexpectedly at the door with her two kittens, and special cats like Jake and the gentle Chutney, as well as "difficult" cats like Chui and poor Mrs. Bumble, and Mr. McT., the bully who found love late in life. Here are graceful cats and cats like Kit–Kat that never look before they jump, in short, countless cats the reader will never forget, even those with many cats of their own.

From the inimitable Campbell McGrath comes an epic poem of george shannon, the youngest member of the lewis and clark expedition, who wandered the prairie alone for sixteen days.The last of the Maha will fade from the earth Vanquished utterly by the Pawnee after the Pawnee the Sioux may perish eventually the Kentuckians and Ohioans I doubt not but my countrymen Will populate in numbers these fulsome plains But what untold count Of years men, of decades centuries What numberless generations will it require Life by life skeleton by skeleton To claim this land from the buffalo?With Shannon, a testament to both natural splendor and human courage, Campbell McGrath has created a thrilling narrative that rises from those vast, lonely spaces that continue to haunt the American consciousness.

The next "screamingly hilarious"(Miami Herald) installment in the wild ride that is the life of Hollis Gillespie. Confessions of a Recovering Slut is the hilarious and often heartrending sequel to Bleachy–Haired Honky Bitch, which concludes with Hollis Gillespie, the daughter of a missile scientist and an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman, at last finding a home of her own. Unfortunately that home just happens to be in one of Atlanta's most dangerous crack neighborhoods–but the place is bound to improve, rightWrong. In Confessions, Gillespie is plagued by missing human torsos, murdered policeman, and a drug dealer who keeps setting fire to her neighbor's house–and all this after Hollis discovers that she is inexplicably (except, maybe, for all that acrobatic sex) pregnant. While the neighborhood might have been fine when she was a child–free urban pioneer, it's a nightmare for a mother with nothing but cake pans to bulletproof the baby's room. Gillespie must depend on her three best friends, Daniel, Grant, and Lary, to help her–although Lary makes it no secret that he hopes the paint fumes she inhaled early in her pregnancy will cause the baby to be born inside out–"that way it'll be easier to sell for parts." Will Gillespie ever feel safeNo matter, she's still Hollis at heart–and, as Lary points out, if not safe, at least "safe from ever being normal."

General Kamel Sachet was a favorite of Saddam Hussein's, a hero of the Iran-Iraq war, head of the army in Kuwait City during Desert Storm, governor of the province of Maysan, and father of nine children. When author Wendell Steavenson became intrigued by his story, she began with a few questions about Sachet and his fellow Baathist loyalists: "Why had they served such a regimeHow had they accommodated their own moralityHow had they livedHow had they lived with themselves?" Her journey to find these answers took five years, and an accumulation of facts, opinions, fears, confessions and suspicions from Sachet's family, friends, and enemies. The result is not just a gripping account of one man's rise and fall, but a vivid and compassionate portrayal of the Iraqi people.As Sachet rose from policeman to Special Forces officer and then General, he made more and more sacrifices to remain in Saddam's good favor. Steadfast in his loyalty to God and his President, Sachet attended military executions and endured his own imprisonment as Saddam's behavior took increasingly paranoiac and power-crazy turns. But when it came time for Sachet's sons to do their military service, he refused to let them join the "criminal" organization to which he had given his life. Kamel Sachet realized, too late, that he'd become a participant in the terror regime that had strangled his county and destroyed its people. Through his story and the stories of those around him, Wendell Steavenson shows the choices Iraqis have had to make between exile and collaboration, God and jihad. Here are the Iraqis behind the headlines and the tragedy begotten of unintended consequences. And here is the first full-length narrative from an immensely talented journalist who has already been compared by critics to Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapucinksi.

From Steven V. Roberts comes My Fathers' Houses, a memoir of growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, an immigrant community in the shadow of the Statue if Liberty, and the story of how his father and his grandfather's dreams and their own passion for writing and ideas influenced Steven's future, and inspired him to seek his fortune in New York City, the media capital of the world. This is a story of a town and a time and a boy who grew up there, a boy who became a New York Times correspondent, TV and radio personality, and best selling author. The town was Bayonne, New Jersey, a European village so close to New York that Steve could see the Statue of Liberty from his bedroom window. The time was the forties and fifties, when children of immigrants were striving to become American and find a place in a booming post war world. The core of Steve's world was one block, where he lived in a house his grandfather, Harry Schanbam, had built with his own hands. But the story starts back in Russia, where the family business of writing and ideas began. Steve's other grandfather, Abraham Rogowsky, stole money to become a Zionist pioneer in Palestine before moving to America. The tale continues through the Depression, when Steve's parents lived one block apart in Bayonne, wrote letters to each other and married in secret. During the war years, Steve's father wrote children's books and based one of his best sellers on outings he took with his twin sons to the local train station. As his byline, he used his boys' middle names Jeffrey Victor so Steve got his first writing credit before he was two. The story concludes with the boy leaving Bayonne, going on to Harvard, meeting the Catholic girl who became his wife, and starting work at the New York Times across the river, and worlds away, from where he began. Now a grandfather of five, Steve Roberts looks in the mirror and sees his own father and grandfather looking back at him–a family chain that started in 19th century Russia and thrives today in 21st century America.