True Adventure

A book remembering a moment in time. A moment I knew, holy crap, this is serious and everyone is looking at me. It was then I realized I am the captain! Having survived my first long solo sail a year ago, I figured it was time to take it up a notch! Sailing has been a passion project of mine. From a young age, I have been set to many different activities by my overactive enthusiasm, from blazing trails on bikes through thicket and bog alike, that run along the local river. To pulling fish too small to fry from that very same river.

I should not have left the garden hoe lying on the ground, but I did. I should have been paying attention. But, I didn’t! I stepped on the blade and the handle hit me in the face, bammm, knocking me out cold! I woke up lying on the ground. It was then that I saw them...gnomes! I couldn’t believe my eyes. They were talking in a strange language, but I could understand them! The old gnome with a beard says, “I think the human sees us and hears us.”

Some people are meant to travel the globe, to unwrap its secrets, and share them with the world. And some people have no sense of direction, are terrified of pigeons, and get motion sickness from tying their shoes. These people are meant to stay home and eat nachos. Geraldine DeRuiter is the latter. But she won't let that stop her. Hilarious, irreverent, and heartfelt, All over the Place chronicles the years Geraldine spent traveling the world after getting laid off from a job she loved.

In The Beer's Folded and the Laundry's Cold: Mostly True Adventures in Housewifery, Paige Kellerman follows up her hilarious debut - At Least My Belly Hides My Cankles - with the natural next step-taking on budgeting, babies, and trying to keep the day drinking down to a minimum while staying at home.

Philip's remarkable career in law in London led to recommendations from which he gained unprecedented access to leading lights in politics and the trade unions. He warns about the many pitfalls that trap the unwary, even what happened to a High Court judge! He recounts many fascinating events, beginning with a landmark case while articled, all the way through acting for such colourful clients as impresarios, actors, airline captains, and members of both houses of Parliament, to ultimately being chosen out of thousands of solicitors by the Prime Minister himself for his Party's prestigious new London headquarters.

Fashion is a business of smoke and mirrors, notorious for crushing the souls of most who dare to be part of the industry. Go on a global expedition with New York City-based fashion buyer, strategist, and consultant, Mercedes Gonzalez, as she learns that there is no glamour in fashion and that only cutthroat corporate espionage prevails. From politicking with blood diamond dealers and Russian kingpins to living in indigenous villages, she has relied on her street smarts and fear of her uncle in order to outwit the industry tyrants at their own game.

In 1967, a retired army major and self-made millionaire named Paddy Roy Bates cemented his family’s place in history when he inaugurated himself ruler of the Principality of Sealand, a tiny dominion of the high seas. And so began the peculiar story of the world’s most stubborn micronation on a World War II anti-aircraft-gun platform off the British coast. Incorporating original interviews with surviving Sealand royals, Dylan Taylor-Lehman recounts the battles and schemes as Roy and his crew engaged with diplomats and even thwarted an attempted coup.

The Thunderbird Motel, 1977. J. J. Wedick and Jack Brennan - two fresh-faced, maverick FBI agents - were about to embark on one of their agency's first wire-wearing undercover missions. Their target? Charismatic, globetrotting con man Phil Kitzer, whom some called the world's greatest swindler. From the Thunderbird, the three men took off to Cleveland, to Miami, to Hawaii, to Frankfurt, to the Bahamas - meeting other members of Kitzer's crime syndicate and powerful politicians and businessmen he fooled at each stop.

In Dragon Ride, the beauty of the Lord is seen through the eyes of Buddhists, atheists, idol-worshippers, Muslims, and an animist as they encounter Jesus. Dragon Ride records the actual conversations Grace had with her friends, and many of them embraced Christ as the answer to their deepest longings. Grace writes about persecution, evading the police, saving lives, helping the homeless and the disabled, and she even writes about the murder of a friend.

After Zack’s revelation, Ike leaves the party and travels alone, arriving at a ruined tower above the quiet mountain village of Glyncroes. He tells himself it’s to keep everyone safe, but can he even do this alone? How long will it take for his party to find him? Will a mask be enough to hide his identity? And why does everyone keep mistaking him for the Unsung Sage of myth?

This story is about a man who had his feelings bottled up for way too long. Not able to tell his family why he did the things he did and not able to recoup the lost years away from the people who he loved. In the Mexican-American community, you never show your sadness, your pain, or weakness. As an act of pride, you always keep all your emotions to yourself like as if nothing is wrong. Showing everyone that you're not suffering and everything is fine is strength.

A fugitive brought them together. Fate gave them a second chance... Fiery US Marshal Blake Parsons is on the hunt for a dangerous fugitive. Time is running out, and the locals in the small Tennessee town aren't much help at all. Just when she's almost given up hope, fate strikes in the form of deja vu and a rendezvous with stunning local doctor Naomi Preston. As sparks fly, Naomi agrees to make inroads with the residents and help Blake find the killer. When a massive flood strikes the town, the search begins to heat up.

“Sharks are as timid as rabbits,” says a superintendent of the Coast Guard, dismissing the possibility that a shark could be the culprit in an unprecedented fatal attack at the Jersey Shore. It’s July, and swimming in the sea is a popular new pastime, but people up and down the East Coast are shocked and mystified by the swimmer’s death. A prominent surgeon at the shore, Dr. Edwin Halsey is the one who examines the victim, and the only one who believes the perpetrator was a shark—and that it will strike again.

A deep dive into the joys of being pure awareness, with new essays, meditations, explorations, and games to help you discover your true nature as happiness itself. From the co-host of the Awareness Explorers podcast, and author of Awareness Games: Playing With your Mind to Create Joy.

Leslie White knew she wanted more out of life - She found it in an unlikely place. Devastated from the loss of both parents to cancer nine months apart, Leslie vowed to change her life. She bought the neighbor’s old motorhome, found a job as a traveling histologist, and hit the road. But she found she could not trust the one person she was still holding onto.

Whole hog barbecue is a culinary art form that is both disappearing and experiencing a renaissance. In The One True Barbecue, Rien Fertel chronicles the uniquely Southern art of whole hog barbecue - America's original barbecue - through the professional pitmasters who make a living firing, smoking, flipping, and cooking 200-plus pound pigs.

Betty Pack was charming, beautiful, and intelligent - and she knew it. As an agent for Britain's MI6 and then America's OSS during World War II, these qualities proved crucial to her success. This is the remarkable story of this "Mata Hari from Minnesota" ( Time) and the passions that ruled her tempestuous life - a life filled with dangerous liaisons and death-defying missions vital to the Allied victory.

Journalist Susan Casey was in her living room when she first glimpsed this strange place and its resident sharks, their dark fins swirling around a tiny boat in a documentary. These great whites were the alphas among alphas, the narrator said, some of them topping 18 feet in length, and each fall they congregated here off the northern California coast.

As a programmer, Ike knows all about Virtual Dive Experiences (VDX), but when he suddenly wakes up in a virtual game he's never heard of, he’s too busy struggling to survive to worry about how he got there. Luckily, he's got a trick up his sleeve: the ability to program custom enchantments for his gear. He’ll need that and more to figure out what’s going on, since there’s no tutorial and True Calling plays by its own rules....

A routine hitchhiking trip into town brings a new person into Andrew’s life that just might have the perfect opportunity for him. His new friend is a volunteer at a Vipassana meditation center. She invites him to join her on a 10-day silent meditation course and then live near the meditation center afterward, doing a very different kind of work-trade than he’s ever done.