Other books that might interest you

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  Bald - How I Slowly Learned to...

  Stuart Heritage

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  This is a guide to life in the club that nobody wants to join. 
   
   
   
  Nobody chooses to be bald. Nobody wants to look into the mirror and be confronted with an absence. Nobody gains any comfort from having a slightly better idea of what their skull looks like. 
   
   
   
  Stuart Heritage has been bald for two years. But before he accepted the inevitable, he spent a number of years ineptly trying to conceal this fact with an array of expensive treatments and terrible haircuts. Can a man go bald with dignity? Maybe. But can a man go bald with more dignity than Stuart Heritage? Oh good god yes, and this book is his attempt to make that happen for you. 
   
   
   
  Part-manual-part-tantrum, this is a self-deprecating, funny and genuinely helpful guide to being bald: what really happens, why it matters, and how to feel much less crap about it.

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  Sit Stay Heal - What Dogs Can...

  Renee Alsarraf

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  “Written with grace and emotional honesty, Sit, Stay, Heal will live with you long after the last page.”— John Grogan, bestselling author of Marley & Me 
  For more than two decades, esteemed veterinary oncologist Dr. Renee Alsarraf treated cancer in her beloved canine patients. Then, at age fifty-one, she was diagnosed with cancer herself. 
  Sit, Stay, Heal: What Dogs Can Teach Us About Living Well is Dr. Renee’s unforgettable testament to the extraordinary healing nature of dogs. Every day in her veterinary practice, she bears witness to the undeniable bond between pets and their people. However, while we are busy teaching them to “sit” and “stay,” they have their own, more profound, lessons to impart. In Sit, Stay, Heal, we meet Cosmo, the golden retriever who arrives at Renee’s office just before his fourteenth family vacation to the beach; Daisy, the cocker spaniel, an emotional support dog for a special needs child; and Franny, the bloodhound, a police dog who wasn’t ready to retire from the force. Then there’s Dr. Renee’s own dog Newtie, who falls ill when she needs him most. 
  Our dogs are wise in ways humans are not. For Dr. Renee, it was her patients—those furry, four-legged, slobbering animals—who seemed to uniquely understand her difficult journey and who showed her the true power of positivity and unconditional love. Full of life lessons and healing metaphors, perfect dogs and their imperfect humans, Sit, Stay, Heal is a captivating, heartwarming story for dog lovers far and wide.

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  Choosing Family - A Memoir of...

  Francesca T. Royster

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  A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides. 
   
  As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts. 
      
  Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

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  Memories of an orphan boy

  Francis Ravel Harvey

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  Orphaned by losing his mother at three and his father - whowent missing at eight – Sydney author Francis Ravel Harveyavoided the Welfare State by being raised by four older sistersin the colourful environs of Sydney in the nineteen thirties.The search for his cultivated English father is a constant threadthroughout the book and reaches an amazing andheartbreaking conclusion when the author finally uncovers thetruth surrounding his father’s death.Harvey’s writing has been compared by one critic with that ofGabriel Garcia Marquez, for his ability to create a real sense ofsuspense and drama from his memories and for the descriptionof the colourful characters who inhabited his world.Journalist and author, Francis Ravel Harvey was born at Homebush, New SouthWales in 1930 and began his career as a cadet journalist on the Sun newspaper in1947. In 1950 he worked for almost ten years as producer of the independentmonthly music journal The Canon. He worked as a freelance journalist in the livetheatre in Sydney, wrote scripts for the ABCs Tales of Many Lands, and episodes ofHomicide for Crawford’s in Melbourne. In 1959 he founded his own bi-monthlymagazine Theatregoer which ran for five years and published the first theatreyearbook for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (1959-60). He was theatrecritic for the Canberra Times in the 70s. and then worked as an editor and writer forHorwitz Publications and Ure Smith, founding the first magazine in Australia onindustrial design, Design Australia, for the Industrial Design Council of Australia,which was endorsed by the Duke of Edinburgh.

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  French Illusions - My story as...

  Linda Kovic-Skow

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  "This is a wonderful debut memoir, made much more appealing because it is true. A well written, fast-paced book enhanced by sprinkles of French..." 
  A futile lie. She does not speak French. She knows it was wrong to accept the nanny position. 
  You'll find this unusual story, based on Linda's diary from 1979, even more engaging because it reads like a novel. 
  Twenty-one-year-old Linda needs to learn a language fast in order to fulfill her lofty dreams. Broke yet determined, she pushes aside feelings of guilt, pretends to speak French on her application and secures a nanny position for a wealthy family in France. 
  Will she be able to redeem herself once she arrives at the Château de Montclair? How will she communicate with the Dubois family, especially the children? 
  When Linda meets Adam, a handsome young student, her life becomes more complicated - much more complicated. 
  Join Linda on her adventure of discovery and romance in an extraordinary part of the world and follow up with the final book in the French Illusions Series - "From Tours to Paris."

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  A Smoke and a Song - A Memoir

  Sherry Sidoti

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  January 2021, ten months into the global pandemic, Sherry Sidoti's mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, so Sherry prioritizes a trip to Manhattan over long-awaited empty-nesting and her "second chance" with fiancé Jevon. With new life blooming and loss looming, she is beckoned to answer the question that has haunted her since childhood: is freedom found in "letting go," as the spiritual teachers (and her mother) insist, or is it found by digging our heels deeper into the earth and holding on to our humanness? 
  A Smoke and a Song is Sherry's story of her quest to make meaning from the memories homed in her body. Writing with tenacity, tenderness, and wry New York City humor, Sherry stumbles toward self-actualization, spiritual awakening, and, despite it all, love. This is a story steeped in art and spirituality that explores the complexities of womanhood, transgenerational maternal bonds, attachment, loss, and leaning into our wounds to find the wisdom.

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