Other books that might interest you

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  Standing Up After Saigon - The...

  Thuhang Tran, Sharon Orlopp

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  This inspiring true story of familial love and triumph through adversity follows a father and daughter separated by war in Vietnam.    In 1970, near the end of the Vietnam War, Thuhang Tran was born in Saigon. She contracted polio as a baby, and though her family sacrificed much to seek treatment, their efforts were halted by Saigon’s fall. Her father, Chinh Tran, an air traffic controller in the South Vietnam Air Force, was lost during the evacuations and presumed dead.   This powerful memoir follows both father and daughter through their respective struggles, from Thuhang's battle with polio and the impact of her father's absence, to Chinh's immigration to the United States and his desperate 15-year mission to be reunited with his family. Through all the seemingly impossible hurdles she’s faced, Thuhang has remained hopeful and resilient. Now she tells her incredible story, inspiring those around her to find strength through perseverance.

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  Complications - The diagnosis...

  Todd Balf

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  His story begins as cliché: an aging jock with nagging lower-back pain. For the better part of a year, he ignores it, convinced he has a slipped or herniated disk. It’s only when he can no longer ride a bike, a lifelong passion, that he makes the doctor appointment. The problem isn’t a disk; it’s a tumor on his spine the size of a softball. 
   
  In the summer of 2014, Todd Balf, author of the acclaimed adventure tales The Darkest Jungle and The Last River, was diagnosed with a rare spinal cancer called chordoma. Only three hundred cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, meaning that Balf was literally one in a million. During two long and risky surgeries, a team of specialists removed the tumor and buttressed his damaged spine with a scaffolding of metal rods. Having survived the surgery, itself a minor miracle, Balf was told that, with some rehab and follow-up radiation, he would soon be back to his former athletic self. He wasn’t. The surgery had resulted in a spinal-cord injury that left one of his legs partially paralyzed. Give it time, his doctors advised. The nerves might heal. 
   
  Thus began Balf’s membership in a tribe. The disabled. He imagined his own disability would be temporary, a short visit to a foreign land. He spent years test-piloting remedies that might spark his spinal nerves back to life. With the same gusto and good humor that he brought to his work as a writer, he searched for the perfect treatment: anti-gravity treadmills, adaptive bikes, endless rehab and trips to the gym, and—why not?—a few long-distance cycling events. His wife and children, long accustomed to Balf’s kinetic energy and sometimes harebrained schemes, cheered him on and hoped for the best. 
   
  Then came unexpected surgery to repair broken rods in Balf’s spine, followed by yet another complication: a stroke that jeopardized not only his recovery but his professional career. Balf wasn’t just one in a million. Thanks to his unresolved spine injury, topped off with a stroke, he was now an “n of 1”—a single case study. Before his long medical misadventure, Balf had always relished being one of the healthiest and fittest people around. Now he was unique for all the wrong reasons.   
   
  Complications recounts Balf’s journey from cancer diagnosis to his present-day reality as a man caught between two worlds. Both moving and irrepressibly joyful, Complications is a forthright account of what it’s like to suffer a physical catastrophe and manage the uncertainty that comes with it. What’s the right balance between striving to recover and accepting limitations? Was he still just visiting the land of the disabled, or there for good? Who was Todd Balf now?

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  Explosion Green - One Man's...

  David Gottfried

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  The inspiring true account of one man’s successful mission to bring sustainability into the building industry around the world.   The winner of three Indie Book Awards, Explosion Green tells the twenty-year story of the global green building movement through the eyes of David Gottfried, the man who helped start it all. Explosion Green reveals the inner workings of the building industry as it comes to grips with the need for environmentally friendly practices. It describes how the industry has evolved, and how this evolution has helped fight climate change and prevent further damage to the environment while creating a multibillion-dollar industry. Filled with his unique insight and self-deprecating humor, Gottfried’s riveting memoir demonstrates how one person can start a global movement.   “Our future depends on sustainability . . . David Gottfried’s pioneering work is proof that we can do it, and Explosion Green tells us how.” —President Bill Clinton   “Transformation of the most important sector in the nation’s energy economy resulted from David Gottfried’s pioneering work. Students and professionals will be inspired by this book as it describes the pathway that led to such monumental results.” —Gil Masters, Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University   “David inspires us to believe we have the ability to envision a future that we might create. He has lived it firsthand and generously shares his learning with us.” —Maria Atkinson Am, Cofounder, Green Building Council of Australia

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  Looking for Andy Griffith - A...

  Evan Dalton Smith

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  Andy Griffith (1926-2012) is one of North Carolina's most beloved exports, capturing America's heart as Sheriff Andy Taylor. Evan Dalton Smith was born in the North Carolina Piedmont over four decades after Andy, just an hour south of Griffith's hometown of Mount Airy. Both were small-town boys who grew up in similar places, where the counties were dry and the churches plentiful. But for both, there was darkness, crushed hopes, and tragedy, hidden just below the surface.For Smith and many generations in North Carolina, Andy Griffith was like the air—everywhere, all the time, a part of daily life. Even after he left the state, Smith always felt the pull of home and the lingering ghost of Andy alongside it. This is an exploration on celebrity and the self, on home and what that means when you leave it, and why we love and admire the people we do—even if we've never met them—all told through the entwined lives of iconic actor Andy Griffith and writer Evan Dalton Smith. It is through Smith's telling of Griffith's life that he finds his own story, one that is both informed by and freed from the legacy of one of North Carolina's most famous sons.

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  Murdered Innocents

  Corey Mitchell

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  On a December night in Austin, Texas, teenagers Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas closed up the yogurt store where they worked. The girls were joined by Jennifer's younger sister, Sarah, and her friend Amy Ayers. Less than an hour later, all four girls were dead—tragic victims of an apparent fire. Until it was discovered that the girls had been bound and gagged, sexually assaulted, and shot execution-style.With no physical evidence or eyewitnesses, Austin police faced one of their toughest cases ever. Nearly eight years passed before four young men were charged with the crime, and authorities learned how a planned robbery exploded into a drug- and sex-fueled spree of brutality. But the road to justice was packed with shocking twists . . .

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  The Star

  H. G. Wells

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  "The Star" is an 1897 apocalyptic short story by H. G. Wells.
  Here is an impressive story based on the inter-action of planetary bodies and of the sun upon them. A great star is seen approaching the earth. At first it is only an object of interest to the general public, but there is an astronomer on the earth, who is watching each phase and making mathematical calculations, for he knows the intimate relation of gravitation between bodies and the effect on rotating bodies of the same force from an outside source. He fears all sorts of wreckage on our earth. He warns the people, but they, as usual, discount all he says and label him mad. But he was not mad. H. G. Wells, in his own way, gives us a picturesque description of the approach of the new body through long days and nights—he tells how the earth and natural phenomena of the earth will react. Though this star never touches our sphere, the devastation and destruction wrought by it are complete and horrible. The story is correct in its astronomical aspects.

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