Flying the not-so-friendly skies... In her more than fifteen years as an airline flight attendant, Heather Poole has seen it all. She's witnessed all manner of bad behavior at 35,000 feet and knows what it takes for a traveler to become the most hated passenger onboard. She's slept in flight attendant crashpads in "Crew Gardens," Queens sharing small bedrooms crammed with bunk beds with a parade of attractive women who come and go at all hours, prompting suspicious neighbors to jump to the very worst conclusions. She's watched passengers and coworkers alike escorted off the planes by police. She can tell you why it's a bad idea to fall for a pilot but can be a very good one (in her case) to date a business-class passenger. Heather knows everything about flying in a post-9/11 world and she knows what goes on behind the scenes, things the passengers would never dream. Heather's true stories in Cruising Attitude are surprising, hilarious, sometimes outrageously incredible the very juiciest of "galley gossip" delightfully intermingled with the eye-opening, unforgettable chronicle of her fascinating life in the sky.

In the fall of 1930, David Packard left his hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, to enroll at Stanford University, where he befriended another freshman, Bill Hewlett. After graduation, Hewlett and Packard decided to throw their lots in together. They tossed a coin to decide whose name should go first on the notice of incorporation, then cast about in search of products to sell. Today, the one-car garage in Palo Alto that housed their first workshop is a California historic landmark: the birthplace of Silicon Valley. And Hewlett-Packard has produced thousands of innovative products for millions of customers throughout the world. Their little company employs 98,400 people and boasts constantly increasing sales that reached $25 billion in 1994. While there are many successful companies, there is only one Hewlett-Packard, because from the very beginning, Hewlett and Packard had a way of doing things that was contrary to the prevailing management strategies. In defining the objectives for their company, Packard and Hewlett wanted more than profits, revenue growth and a constant stream of new, happy customers. Hewlett-Packard success owes a great deal to many factors, including openness to change, an unrelenting will to win, the virtue of sustained hard work and a company-wide commitment to community involvement. As a result, HP now is universally acclaimed as the world most admired technology company; its wildly successful approach to business has been immortalized as The HP Way . In this book, David Packard tells the simple yet extraordinary story of his life work and of the truly exceptional company that he and Bill Hewlett started in a garage 55 years ago.

Unicorns are just like us. They have problems, stresses, and like to blow off some steam. Author and illustrator C. W. Moss explores the inner psyche of the single-horned in Why Unicorn Drinks . A follow-up to Unicorn Being a Jerk , this volume of 67 four-color illustrations and captions gives readers a glimpse into the sad reality of life as a mythical creature, and reveals what drives Unicorn to the bottle. As fans of Moss' online comic undoubtedly know, Why Unicorn Drinks pours a double-shot of laughter and irreverence. You'll never look at a unicorn the same way again.

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His study leads to his own death -- and to the author timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition featuring a new foreword by Russell Banks. Tappan Wilder has written an engaging and thought-provoking afterword, which includes unpublished notes for the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, illuminating photographs, and other remarkable documentary material. Granville Hicks insightful comment about Wilder suggests an inveterate truth: As a craftsman he is second to none, and there are few who have looked deeper into the human heart.

Once again Alexander Cold and his indomitable journalist grandmother, Kate, are braving the mystical unknown, this time in the heart of Africa. Along with Alex's friend Nadia Santos and a photographic crew from International Geographic magazine, they have travelled to Kenya to work on an article about the continent's first elephant-led safaris. But when a missionary approaches their camp in search of companions who have mysteriously disappeared, Alex, Nadia, and their group find themselves embarking on a dangerous mission to Africa's equatorial forest to aid a clan of Pygmies. For the Cold expedition is the tribe's last hope for survival in a world where poaching, corruption, and slavery run rampant.Forest of the Pygmies is the concluding volume of acclaimed author Isabel Allende's celebrated trilogy, which begins with City of the Beasts and continues with Kingdom of the Golden Dragon.

Bakerton is a community of company houses and church festivals, of union squabbles and firemen's parades. Its neighborhoods include Little Italy, Swedetown, and Polish Hill. For its tight-knit citizens -- and the five children of the Novak family -- the 1940s will be a decade of excitement, tragedy, and stunning change. Baker Towers is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and place long gone, to America's industrial past, and to the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. It is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.

Hailed by Utne Reader as "a visionary" and the San Francisco Chronicle as "the X-rated intellectual," Susie Bright is indisputably the sexpert of our times. Now, in a frank and intimate look at our own erotic experience, she delves into the most personal aspects of sex and shows us how our sexual passion can be a source of creativity and inspiration. By her own example and insight, she helps us to discover our own erotic story and sexual philosophy. How do talking, reading, and writing about sex affect your actual sex life What are the real differences between men's and women's sense of the eroticWhy is it so threatening to consciously address sexual desire in the first placeIs there a line to be drawn in erotic creativity--can you go too farIs the best erotic expression soulfulHow can articulate erotic expression make us better lovers and, more important, better peopleBright concludes with an "erotic manifesto" that is a call for everyone to reclaim sexuality, cast off sexual shame, overcome repression, and become true sexual beings. She offers up "rules to live by," which include debunking your own fantasy life, appreciating the simplest erotic gesture, and taking inspiration from everyone but instruction from no one. Bright's work celebrates the joy of sexual creativity--and the very uniqueness of each individual's sense of the erotic. Susie Bright is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including The Best American Erotica series, the first three editions of Herotica, Sexwise, and The Sexual State of the Union. She has written for Esquire, Playboy, Village Voice, New York Times Book Review, and is a regular columnist for the on-line magazine Salon. She lectures and performs at theaters and universities nationwide and currently lives in Northern California. How do you really feel about sex"I want to cut through all the labels and politics, and reveal what I've learned about sex - what has been transformational for me as a lover, a parent, a daughter, and an artist. I want to argue that sexuality is the soul of the creative process, and that erotic expression of any kind is a personal revolution." -- from Full Exposure Bestselling author and erotic pioneer Susie Bright boldly crosses our culture's most private boundary--our personal eroticism--and reveals the ways in which individual sexual expression has the power to inspire, challenge, and transform all aspects of our lives. Bright explores some of the most complex questions about sexuality today, including: how our emotional and sexual lives intertwine, how we can come clean about our true desire, and what sexual expression teaches us about our bodies. She offers an erotic manifesto of seventeen straightforward guidelines for gaining erotic freedom.

"My parents may love me, but I also know they view me as a houseguest who is turning a weekend stay into an all-expense-paid, lifelong residency, and who (to their horror) constantly forgets to flush the toilet and shut off the lights." Twenty-six-year-old Frannie Hunter has just moved back home. Bright, wry, blunt, and irreverent, she invites you to witness her family's unraveling. Her Harvard-bound sister is anorexic, her mother is having an affair, her father is obsessed with the Food Network, her grandfather wants to plan her wedding (even though she has no fiancé, let alone a steady boyfriend), and, to top it off, Frannie is a waitress who wears a dirty duck apron and serves plates of fried cheese to her ex-boyfriend's parents. By turns wickedly funny and heartbreakingly bittersweet, Hunger Point chronicles Frannie's triumph over her own self-destructive tendencies, and offers a powerful exploration of the complex relationships that bind together a contemporary American family. You will never forget Frannie, a "sultry, suburban Holden Caulfield," who critics have called "the most fully realized character to come along in years," (Paper) and you'll never forget Hunger Point, an utterly original novel that stuns with its amazing insights and dazzles with its fresh, distinctive voice.

The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges money and celebrity bring. His wife of ten years, Esther, is a war correspondent who has disappeared along with a friend, Mikhail, who may or may not be her lover.Was Esther kidnapped, murdered, or did she simply escape a marriage that left her unfulfilledThe narrator doesn't have any answers, but he has plenty of questions of his own. Then one day Mikhail finds the narrator and promises to reunite him with his wife. In his attempt to recapture a lost love, the narrator discovers something unexpected about himself.

When Georgia Quillian returns to her hometown of Miami, her husband, Graham, and their young son in tow, she is hoping for a fresh start. The family has fled Illinois trailing scandal and disappointment, the fallout from Graham's severe sleep disorder and Georgia's failed business. To make matters worse, their charming three-year-old son, Frankie, has for months refused to speak a word.Although Georgia is still grieving her mother's death from five years earlier, her father and stepmother offer warm welcome—and a slip for the dilapidated houseboat Georgia and Graham have chosen to call home. On a lark, Georgia takes a job as an errand runner for a reclusive artist who lives in the middle of the bay, and she soon finds that time spent with the intense hermit might help Frankie find the courage to speak, and might also help her reconcile the woman she was with the woman she has become.But when Graham leaves to work on a research vessel in Hurricane Alley, and the truth behind Frankie's mutism is revealed, the family's challenges return, more complicated than before. As a hurricane bears down on South Florida later that summer, Georgia must face the fact that her choices have put her only child in grave danger.Sea Creatures is a mesmerizing exploration of the high stakes of marriage and parenthood, the story of a woman forced to choose between her husband, her child, and the possibility of new love.

A powerful debut novel in which a man, frozen in the Arctic ice for more than a century, awakens in the present day and finds the greatest discovery is love . . .The Curiosity Dr. Kate Philo and her scientific exploration team make a breathtaking discovery in the Arctic: the body of a man buried deep in the ice. As a scientist in a groundbreaking project run by the egocentric and paranoid Erastus Carthage, Kate has brought small creatures—plankton, krill, shrimp—back to life for short periods of time. But the team's methods have never been attempted on larger life-forms.Heedless of the potential consequences, Carthage orders that the frozen man be brought back to the lab in Boston and reanimated. The endeavor is named "The Lazarus Project." As the man begins to regain his memories, the team learns that he was—is—a judge, Jeremiah Rice, and the last thing he remembers is falling overboard into the Arctic Ocean in 1906. When news of the project and Jeremiah Rice breaks, it ignites a media firestorm and protests by religious fundamentalists.Thrown together by fate, Kate and Jeremiah grow closer. But the clock is ticking and Jeremiah's new life is slipping away. With Carthage planning to exploit Jeremiah while he can, Kate must decide how far she is willing to go to protect the man she has come to love.A gripping, poignant, and thoroughly original thriller, Stephen P. Kiernan's provocative debut novel raises disturbing questions about the very nature of life and humanity—man as a scientific subject, as a tabloid novelty, as a living being: a curiosity.

A strange and compelling unkillable woman decides to leave home, and the story begins. Fleur Pillager takes her mother's name, Four Souls, for strength and walks from her Ojibwe reservation to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She is seeking restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation. But revenge is never simple, and she quickly finds her intentions complicated by her own dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her. The two narrators of Four Souls are from utterly different worlds. Nanapush, a "smart man and a fool," is both Fleur's savior and her conscience. He tells Fleur's story and tells his own. He would like a calm and discriminating love with his sweetheart, Margaret. He is old and would like to face death with his love beside him. Instead the two find themselves battling out their last years. When the childhood nemesis of Nanapush appears and casts his eye toward Margaret, Nanapush acts out an absurd revenge of his own and nearly ends up destroying everything. The other narrator, Polly Elizabeth Gheen, is a pretentious and vulnerable upper-crust fringe element, a hanger-on in a wealthy Minneapolis family, a woman aware of her precarious hold on those around her. To her own great surprise the entrance of Fleur Pillager into her household and her life effects a transformation she could never have predicted. In the world of interconnected novels by Louise Erdrich, Four Souls is most closely linked to Tracks. All these works continue and elaborate the intricate story of life on a reservation peopled by saints and false saints, heroes and sinners, clever fools and tenacious women. Four Souls reminds us of the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of this world, and is as beautiful and lyrical as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

Squarely in the crosshairs of the Church's heresy hunters, can Pastor Sam survive?It's a madcap year in Harmony, Indiana, as Sam Gardner struggles through his fourth year as pastor of the Harmony Friends Meeting. Join the thousands of readers who have fallen in love with the charming small town that hosts what BookPage calls "the biggest collection of crusty, lovable characters since James Herriot settled in Yorkshire."

American children's book illustrator Irina McGovern enjoys a secure, settled life in London with her smart, loyal, disciplined partner, Lawrence until the night she finds herself inexplicably drawn to kissing another man, a passionate, extravagant, top-ranked snooker player. Two competing alternate futures hinge on this single kiss, as Irina's decision to surrender to temptation or to preserve her seemingly safe partnership with Lawrence will have momentous consequences for her career, her friendships and familial relationships, and the texture of her daily life.

Where were the kissesWeetzie Bat wondered. And so begins a magical journey of discovery. As she turns forty and the relationship with her secret-agent lover-man Max falls apart, Weetzie packs up her lime green and bright orange bikini, orange suede sneakers, and Pucci tunic, jumps in her '65 mint green Thunderbird, and leaves. Weetzie finds herself at the enchanted pink hotel in sparkling Los Angeles, where she once shied away from a kiss that may have led her to the love of her life. Now she returns, perhaps in search of her lost passion, and meets an otherworldy cast of characters, among them a blue-skinned receptionist, an invisible cleaning lady, a seductive fawn, and a sushi-eating mermaid who gives her a kiss that sets the wheel of self-discovery in motion. Block invests every scene with equal shots of magic and realism, rendering her heroine and supporting players in vivid, poetic detail. In Necklace of Kisses the fans that have grown up with Weetzie Bat will be able to meet her in adulthood and find that life is still no less trying and no less full of wonder.

The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano -- the future dictator of Paraguay -- begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and ahorse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asuncin and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover's ill-fated imperial dream -- one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay.With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel Garca Mrquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Diabetes could have killed me. Instead, it saved my life."—Sherri ShepherdThe day that actress, comedian, and cohost of The View Sherri Shepherd was diagnosed with the Big D—type 2 diabetes—she didn't see it coming. But she should have. Sherri had spent years battling excess weight, ignoring the warning that she was prediabetic, avoiding doctors, and denying some very clear signs that a diabetes diagnosis was imminent. Even watching the disease take her mother's life at the age of forty-one didn't sound the alarm for Sherri. But when D Day came, she had a diagnosis in hand and a child of her own. Sherri knew she needed to take a cold, hard look at the way she was living and make a choice: she could completely overhaul her life and reevaluate her relationship to food and exercise, or continue on a path that could leave her son growing up without his mother. The choice was easy. Putting the choice into action was a little more difficult.If you're one of the 100 million Americans diagnosed with prediabetes or diabetes each year, or one of the 130 million people who are overweight and at risk but don't know where to start, Plan D can provide life- changing results. Here, Sherri Shepherd breaks down the basics of the science of diabetes, explains how reversing your insulin resistance (the cause of type 2 diabetes) is the key, and offers support, humor, and the action plan you need to get results. With this medically supported plan, Sherri was able to lose forty pounds and keep it off. Through three key simple but effective strategies centered on diet, exercise, and taking control of the emotions that lead to poor food choices, Sherri offers readers a way to lose weight and control diabetes without feeling deprived, or chained to a strict, lifeless way of living. Plan D is flexible, sensible, and straight-forward, and it works wherever you are on the spectrum—whether you're struggling to lose weight, are in the danger zone of prediabetes and looking to turn things around, or have already been diagnosed with diabetes.Plan D will give you the facts you need to start changing your habits and your health now. With the help of her doctor, a leading endocrinologist, and a support group of family and close friends, Sherri changed her life. With Plan D, you can too.

While parked at a gas station, Rhonda sees something so incongruously surreal that at first she hardly recognizes it as a crime in progress. She watches, unmoving, as someone dressed in a rabbit costume kidnaps a young girl. Devastated over having done nothing, Rhonda joins the investigation. But the closer she comes to identifying the abductor, the nearer she gets to the troubling truth about another missing child: her best friend, Lizzy, who vanished years before.From the author of the acclaimed Promise Not to Tell comes a chilling and mesmerizing tale of shattered innocence, guilt, and ultimate redemption.

I'd wondered about my mother all my life -- what she looked like, how she smelled and sounded and acted. Lately this wondering had grown to encompass a curiosity about the kind of people she herself came from, because they were my family, too, after all, even though I knew nothing about them. I'd no idea whether they were loud or soft-spoken, funny or boring, preferred chocolate to vanilla, if they liked movies over books or the other way around. I wondered whether any of them had ever done anything magnificent in their lives, or if they were the kind of folks who were satisfied with just getting by. These things were important -- knowing them would help me to know myself, and the only way that would happen was if I went and looked for her.With all his possessions on his motorcycle, Billy Mann sets off on a cross-country odyssey from New York to Santa Fe in search of a mother who deserted him long ago. What Billy discovers, however, is a life rich with possibility -- the chance for love, friendship, and, finally, a family to call his own.

In a world where the slightest edge can mean the difference between success and failure, Leisha Camden is beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent ... and one of an ever-growing number of human beings who have been genetically modified to never require sleep.Once considered interesting anomalies, now Leisha and the other "Sleepless" are outcasts -- victims of blind hatred, political repression, and shocking mob violence meant to drive them from human society ... and, ultimately, from Earth itself.But Leisha Camden has chosen to remain behind in a world that envies and fears her "gift" -- a world marked for destruction in a devastating conspiracy of freedom ... and revenge.

From Doris Lessing, "one of the most important writers of the past hundred years" (Times of London), comes a brilliant, darkly provocative alternative history of humankind’s beginnings.In the last years of his life, a Roman senator embarks on one final epic endeavor, a retelling of the history of human creation. The story he relates is the little-known saga of the Clefts, an ancient community of women with no knowledge of nor need for men. Childbirth was controlled through the cycles of the moon, and only female offspring were born—until the unanticipated event that jeopardized the harmony of their close-knit society: the strange, unheralded birth of a boy.