Hollywood icon Dick Van Dyke will celebrate his 90th birthday in December 2015. He is a beloved legend, having starred in Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. And he is still keeping himself busy, entertaining America on television, movies, the stage, and social media. Everyone wonders, “How does he do it?” For the first time, Van Dyke will share his secrets and tips on aging: Just keep moving.
Keep Moving is a heartwarming memoir and inspiring instruction book on how to embrace aging with a positive attitude.
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When young Martha Long’s feckless mother hooks
up with Jackser (“that bandy aul bastard”), and
starts having more babies, the abuse and poverty
in the house grow more acute. Martha is regularly
sent out to beg and more often steal, and her wiles
(as a child of seven or eight) are often the only
thing keeping food on the table. Jackser is a master
of paranoid anger and outbursts, keeping the children in an unheated
tenement, unable to go to school, ready prey to his unpredictable rages.
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In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses our fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in our children’s air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, she suggests that we cannot immunize our children, or ourselves, against the world. As she explores the metaphors surrounding immunity, Biss extends her conversations with other mothers to meditations on the myth of Achilles, Voltaire’s Candide, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors,
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Would you cut out your healthy breasts and ovaries if you thought it might save your life? That’s not a theoretical question for journalist Lizzie Stark’s relatives, who grapple with the horrific legacy of cancer built into the family DNA. The BRCA mutation has robbed most of her female relatives of breasts, ovaries, peace of mind, or life itself.
In Pandora’s DNA, Stark uses her family’s experience to frame a larger story about the so-called breast cancer genes, exploring the morass of legal quandaries, scientific developments, medical breakthroughs, and ethical concerns that surround the BRCA mutations.
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An investigative journalist uncovers a hidden custom that will transform your understanding of what it means to grow up as a girl.
In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as “dressed up like a boy”) is a third kind of child – a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world. Jenny Nordberg, the reporter who broke the story of this phenomenon for the New York Times,
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National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson delivers a brilliant and riveting account of the Siege of Leningrad and the role played by Russian composer Shostakovich and his Leningrad Symphony.
In September of 1941, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history—almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943. More than a million citizens perished. Survivors recall corpses littering the frozen streets; their relatives having neither the means nor the strength to bury them. Residents burned books,
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