Other books that might interest you

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  Take This Bread - A Radical...

  Sara Miles

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  Raised as an atheist, Sara Miles lived an enthusiastically secular life as a restaurant cook and a writer. Then early one winter morning, for no earthly reason, she wandered into a church. "I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian," she writes, "or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut." But she ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and found herself radically transformed.A lesbian left-wing journalist who covered revolutions around the world, Miles was not the woman her friends expected to see suddenly praising Jesus. She was certainly not the kind of person the government had in mind to run a "faith-based charity." Religion for her was not about angels or good behavior or piety; it was about real hunger, real food, and real bodies. Before long, she turned the bread she ate at communion into tons of groceries, piled on the church's altar to be given away. The first food pantry she established provided hundreds of poor, elderly, sick, deranged, and marginalized people with lifesaving food and a sense of belonging. Within a few years, the loaves had multiplied, and she and the people she served had started nearly a dozen more pantries.

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  Man On The Moon

  Various Authors

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  When Kennedy spoke of landing a man on the moon it seemed an impossible task “We do this not because it is easy but because it is hard”.  Man was spacebound and Kennedy’s goal was to achieve this on many levels; to show the Soviet Union that America was the pre-eminent Superpower, to give a boost to the military industrial complex and to rally America to a common purpose and goal.

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  The People Have Spoken - A "This...

  Mark Shields

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  Political commentator Mark Shields expresses his faith in politics and admiration for politicians willing to take an unpopular stand, in "The People Have Spoken", his contribution to NPR's This I Believe series.  
  This I Believe is a National Public Radio program that features Americans, from the famous to the unknown, completing the thought that begins with the series title. The pieces that make up the program compel listeners to re-think not only what and how they have arrived at their own personal beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others. 
  Featuring a star-studded list of contributors that includes John McCain, Isabel Allende, and Colin Powell, as well as pieces from the original 1950's series including Helen Keller and Jackie Robinson, the This I Believe collection also contains essays by a Brooklyn lawyer, a woman who sells yellow pages advertising in Fort Worth, and a man who serves on the state of Rhode Island's parole board. The result is a stirring, funny and always provocative trip inside the minds and hearts of a diverse group of Americans whose beliefs, and the incredibly varied ways in which they choose to express them, reveal the American spirit at its best.

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  A Working Life - A True Story

  A. F. Lodge

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  Work didn't necessarily define A. F. Lodge's, but his career in chemical engineering saw him live a wonderfully rich and fascinating life. In this busy and informative memoir, Lodge not only sums up the total of his experience but elaborates on the excitement and satisfaction of an amazing journey; gratification that money can't buy. With a keen wit and raconteur's ability to entertain, Lodge leads us on a story through changing times and a variety of projects that saw him travel all over the world. With anecdotes flying across the pages underscoring culture as much as the intricacies of engineering projects, the author affords himself space to comment on more than just the work aspects. A travel compendium, autobiography and crash course on the evolution of the chemical engineering sector, Lodge has given us something eminently readable while he spends his retirement keeping active and reminiscing about A Working Life well spent.

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  These Fevered Days - Ten Pivotal...

  Martha Ackmann

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  An engaging, intimate portrait of Emily Dickinson, one of America's greatest and most-mythologized poets, that sheds new light on her groundbreaking poetry. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, "All things are ready"?and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely "at home" (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson's interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was ambivalent toward publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer.In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson's life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, her startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, her anguished letters to an unidentified "Master," her exhilarating frenzy of composition, and her terror in confronting possible blindness. Together, these ten days provide new insights into Dickinson's wildly original poetry and render a concise and vivid portrait of American literature's most enigmatic figure.

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  The Hungry Ocean

  Linda Greenlaw

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  In his number-one bestseller, The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger describes Linda Greenlaw as "one of the best sea captains, period, on the East Coast."  Now Greenlaw tells her own riveting story of a thirty-day swordfishing voyage aboard one of the best-outfitted boats on the East Coast, complete with danger, humor, and characters so colorful they seem to have been ripped from the pages of Moby Dick. The excitement starts immediately, even before Greenlaw and her five-man crew leave the dock - and it doesn't stop until the last page. Under way, she must cope with nasty weather, equipment failure, and treachery aboard ship, not to mention the routinely backbreaking work of operating a fishing boat.Displaying a true fisherman's gift for storytelling and a true writer's flair for both drama and reflection, Greenlaw offers an exciting real-life adventure tale filled with the beauty and power of the sea.

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