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  The Power of Days - A Story of...

  Celeste Mergens

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  In 2008, Celeste Mergens was working with an overcrowded orphanage on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, when she learned that menstruating girls sat on cardboard in their rooms for several days each month.This set into motion a simple idea—combining a washable, long-lasting pad with taboo-breaking education—that became a catalyst for an unlikely global movement for equity.Written in short, evocative chapters, The Power of Days tells the story of Mergens's quest to rally a global response to elevate menstrual health, increase universal access to menstrual supplies, shatter stigma through education, and advocate for global policy change. Raised in poverty by a mentally ill parent, Mergens learned early on that building the life she wanted would take equal parts determination and humility, traits that led her to create the kinds of inclusive conversations and solutions she is known for around the globe.The challenges Mergens faced and the lessons she learned, personally and professionally, and the triumphs and resourcefulness of leaders all over the globe are illuminating to all who wish to make a difference and create a more equitable world.This enhanced audio recording features an audio-exclusive Q&A between Days for Girls cofounders Celeste and Don Mergens.

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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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  Son of Apollo - The Adventures...

  Christopher A. Roosa, James Lovell

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  Christopher A. Roosa grew up the eldest son of Apollo 14 astronaut and command module pilot Stuart A. Roosa. As a child of the space program, Christopher had a ringside seat at the dinner table of one of twenty-four Americans who had either entered lunar orbit or landed on the moon. The first book written by an offspring of an Apollo astronaut to focus on growing up in that era, Son of Apollo tells the inside story of the life of his father, a man who had a remarkable career despite always believing his air force career was "off-track," from his initial application to the service to his removal from the prime crew of Apollo 13 and his subsequent assignment to Apollo 14. During the Apollo 13 mission and recovery, Stuart played an integral role in developing the procedures to return the crew to Earth safely. The focus—and the pressure—of the entire Apollo program then shifted to the Apollo 14 mission. If the Apollo program was to continue, Stuart and the Apollo 14 crew would need to get safely to the moon, land, and return.In writing about his father's career, Christopher Roosa also shows us a familial side of the Apollo experience, from the daily struggles of growing up in the shadow of a father who was necessarily away in training most of the year to the expectations involved in being an astronaut's son.

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  Out of Line - A Memoir

  Dov Fedler

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  "You'll be a dentist," says Dad. "Why?" I ask. "Because you'll be called doctor and you won't be called out at night." "I'm not sticking my hands down anyone's mouth. Yech!" DOV FEDLER was a laatlammetjie, born and bred in Johannesburg in 1940 just as Hitler was getting into his stride. A third child was not on his parents' 'want-list'. It was hard enough supporting two much older children and a printing business struggling to exist. When Dov was about three his mother had a 'nervous breakdown' which is when he remembers seeing his first pencil and knowing precisely what it was that he wanted to do with his life. There are no coincidences in Dov's life. He believes that a hand of destiny has steered his path. Many dramatic encounters (not with aliens or spirits, but with everyday people) have shaped him and he wouldn't have missed any of it. Dov's story is intensely personal and honest, with a powerful combination of humour, emotion and community history. OUT OF LINE attempts to do a few short things. It is an autobiography but it is also an attempt to capture a particular history of a specific generation; that of the Jewish baby boomers who descended from mainly Lithuanian stock. Dov has been a leading South African cartoonist for more than 45 years, and his earliest dream was to work for Walt Disney. He has always known his career was somewhere in drawing. He got to visit Disney World and could not wait to leave. He has never been to Europe or Brakpan and is a pure product of Johannesburg. The last on his wish list was to become a political cartoonist.

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  Alarms and Discursions

  G. K. Chesterton

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  Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an influential English writer of the early 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy, and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox." He wrote in an off-hand, whimsical prose studded with startling formulations.  Chesterton wrote about 4000 essays on various subjects, and "Alarms and Discursions is one of his collections. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia by Karen Merline.)

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  The True History of Merlin the...

  Anne Lawrence-Mathers

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  A medieval historian examines what we really know about the man who was “Merlin the Magician” and his impact on Britain. Merlin has remained an enthralling and curious individual since he was first introduced in the twelfth century in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae.  But although the Merlin of literature and Arthurian myth is well known, his “historical” figure and his relation to medieval magic are less familiar. In this book Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores just who he was and what he has meant to Britain.The historical Merlin was no rough magician: he was a learned figure from the cutting edge of medieval science and adept in astrology, cosmology, prophecy, and natural magic, as well as being a seer and a proto-alchemist. His powers were convincingly real—and useful, for they helped to add credibility to the “long-lost” history of Britain which first revealed them to a European public. Merlin’s prophecies reassuringly foretold Britain’s path, establishing an ancient ancestral line and linking biblical prophecy with more recent times. Merlin helped to put British history into world history.Lawrence-Mathers also explores the meaning of Merlin’s magic across the centuries, arguing that he embodied ancient Christian and pagan magical traditions, recreated for a medieval court and shaped to fit a new moral framework. Linking Merlin’s reality and power with the culture of the Middle Ages, this remarkable book reveals the true impact of the most famous magician of all time.“The story of how the image of Merlin as political prophet, magician and half-demon evolved in the Middle Ages is as fascinating as any romance.”—Euan Cameron

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