Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home—to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community. With great humor and great tenderness, Heart in the Right Place shows that some of our biggest heroes are the ones living right beside us.
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After Alice Pung’s family fled to Australia from the killing fields of Cambodia, her father chose Alice as her name because he thought their new country was a Wonderland. In this lyrical, bittersweet debut memoir—already an award-winning bestseller when it was published in Australia—Alice grows up straddling two worlds, East and West, her insular family and the Australia outside. With wisdom beyond her years and a keen eye for comedy in everyday life, she writes of the trials of assimilation and cultural misunderstanding, and of the tender but fraught relationships between three generations of women trying to live the Australian dream without losing themselves.
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One month after her wedding day, thirty-three-year-old Cami Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and the life she knew changed forever. Cami was soon in and out of LA’s emergency rooms with alarming frequency as she battled the neurological condition that left her barely able to walk and put enormous stress on her marriage. Each day brought new negative thoughts: I’m going to end up in a wheelchair. Mark’s probably going to leave me. My life is over. Why did this have to happen to me?
Then, as a remedy for her condition,
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In 2005, First Sergeant Charles Monroe King began to write what would become a two-hundred-page journal for his son in case he did not make it home from the war in Iraq. He was killed by a roadside bomb on October 14, 2006. His son, Jordan, was seven months old. A Journal for Jordan is a mother’s letter to her son about the father he lost before he could even speak–including a fiercely honest account of her search for answers about Charles’s death. It is also a father’s advice and prayers for the son he will never know.
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A gorgeous, romantic memoir of a young woman’s year in Damascus, where she studied the Muslim Jesus, fled to an ancient desert monastery to heal her past, and unexpectedly found herself in love with a French novice monk.
In 2004, twenty-seven-year-old Stephanie Saldaña traveled to Damascus, Syria, on a Fulbright fellowship to study the role of the prophet Jesus in Islam. She was also fleeing a broken heart. It was not an ideal time to be an American in the Middle East-the United States had recently invaded Iraq, refugees were flooding into Damascus, and dark rumors swirled that Syria might be next to come under American attack.
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Before she turned twenty, Lynne Cox had broken the men’s and women’s world records for swimming the English Channel, swum from Catalina Island to the California mainland, and braved the dangerous Cook Strait between New Zealand’s North and South Islands. But that was just the beginning.
Capturing the thrill of a life dedicated to excellence, Swimming to Antarctica tells the remarkable stories behind Lynne”s victories, which went on to include swimming across the Bering Strait-a feat that, according to Mikhail Gorbachev, helped diminish tensions between “Thrilling, vivid, and lyrical, an inspiring account of a life of aspiration and adventure.”-the U.S.S.R.
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