This searing memoir shares the trauma and triumphs of Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir’s time inside America’s most notorious prison. In 2001, they were arrested in Bosnia, wrongly accused of participating in a terrorist plot. Instead of being freed, they were flown blindfolded and shackled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were held in outdoor cages as the military prison was built around them.
For the next seven years, they endured torture, harassment, force-feedings, and beatings, not knowing if they would ever see their families again. They had no opportunity to argue their innocence until 2008, when the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in their case,
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In 2011, when she was in her late fifties, beloved author and journalist Joyce Maynard met the first true partner she had ever known. Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn’t mind the mess she made in the kitchen. He was not the husband Joyce imagined, but he quickly became the partner she had always dreamed of.
Before they met, both had believed they were done with marriage, and even after they married,
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An unlikely marathoner finds her way through grief and into the untold history of women and running. Thirty-year-old Catriona Menzies-Pike defined herself in many ways: voracious reader, pub crawler, feminist, backpacker, and, since her parents’ deaths a decade earlier, orphan. “Runner” was nowhere near the list. Yet when she began training for a half marathon on a whim, she found herself an instant convert. Soon she realized that running, “a pace suited to the precarious labor of memory,” was helping her to grieve the loss of her parents in ways that she had been, for ten messy years, running away from.
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A memoir of one tumultuous year of boyhood in Fort Worth, Texas, opening with a handshake with JFK, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed.
After John F. Kennedy’s speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor’s teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president’s assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex.
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Vanishing Streets reveals an American writer’s twenty-year love affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London’s most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in “the world’s most visited city,” he rediscovers and reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places,
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In thirty-six thrilling days, Melanie Radzicki McManus hiked 1,100 miles around Wisconsin, landing her in the elite group of Ice Age Trail thru-hikers known as Thousand-Milers. In prose that is alternately harrowing and humorous, McManus takes you with her on an “into-the-wild” Ice Age experience through Wisconsin’s forests, prairies, wetlands, farms, and far-flung small towns.
Follow along as she worries about wildlife encounters, wonders if her injured feet will ever recover, and searches for an elusive fellow hiker known as Papa Bear. Woven throughout her account are details of the history of the still-developing Ice Age Trail—one of just eleven National Scenic Trails—and helpful insights and strategies for undertaking a successful thru-hike.
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