In 1980, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student named Aaron Lansky set out to rescue the world’s abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Twenty-five years and one and a half million books later, he’s still in the midst of a great adventure. Filled with poignant and often laugh-out-loud tales from Lansky’s travels across the country collecting books from older Jewish immigrants, Outwitting History also introduces us to a dazzling array of writers and shows us how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future.
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Join Michael Lisagor on his hunt for lost treasure in the jungles of urban America and the depths of his life, as he transforms from a confused and sad teenager into a creative and happy adult, father and spouse. With warmth and wit, Lisagor chronicles his thirty-six years of applying Buddhist practice and principles to his life.
Gain a better understanding of Nichiren Buddhism, learn how to apply Buddhist principles to your life, raise happy children, overcome major challenges and build successful, loving relationships with Romancing the Buddha. The book also contains an overview of Nichiren Buddhism as well as a glossary of Buddhist terms.
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At age 21, Gilberta meets and, a year and a half later, marries a dashing young Air Force fighter pilot. She leaps into the unique challenges of raising a family with lives framed by worldwide travel, military aviation, and the constant specter of combat. She learns to cope with seeing young pilots lose their lives in plane crashes, joining other wives in comforting the widows, and helping them pack up their children and leave the familial embrace of the military. Meanwhile, Gilberta strives to protect her own children from that looming unspoken fear—that their father could perish while in service as a jet pilot.
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From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
A spare, lucid, and remarkably moving examination of the year following her husband’s sudden death just before their fortieth anniversary, The Year of Magical Thinking is the story of Didion’s search for answers, for relief, and above all for the chance to change the course of events.
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A mother’s memoir celebrates the joys and demands of raising a Down syndrome child.
From the moment she held him in her arms, Anne Crosby had deep fears for her newborn son. Although the staff at the hospital in London paid no attention to her concerns, her instincts were correct: Matthew had Down syndrome. After struggling with her contradictory feelings, Crosby set about doing whatever she could to help Matthew lead as full a life as possible. Matthew is the moving, honest, perceptive, and often funny account of the life he made with the help of his mother and many other caring people.
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A moving, vividly told memoir full of heart, drama, and exquisite comic timing, about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar.
J.R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: It was the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, J.R. would press his ear to a clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of masculinity, and the keys to his own identity. J.R.’s mother was his world, his anchor, but he needed something else, something he couldn’t name.
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