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"In this radiant work of creative nonfiction, internationally beloved novelist Val McDermid delivers a dazzling ode to a lost world, ruminating on a single winter in her life as she journeys into the heart of the season's ever-evolving community-based traditions. In Winter, McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and...

Poet Maya Angelou's chronicle of her early life, focusing on her childhood in 1930s rural Arkansas, including her rape at the age of five, her subsequent years of muteness, and the strength she gained from her grandmother and Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a respected African-American woman in her town.

"A memoir of the author's journey from an office job to restoring a cabin in the Pacific Northwest, based on his wildly popular Outside Magazine piece. Wit's End isn't just a state of mind. It's an address, for a run-down off-the-grid cabin, 120 shabby square feet of fixer-upper Patrick Hutchison purchased on a whim in the mossy woods of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. To say Hutchison didn't know what he was getting into is no more an...

Ken Smith has spent the past four decades in the Scottish Highlands. He lives alone, with no electricity or running water. His home is a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as 'the lonely loch', where he lives off the land: he fishes for his supper, chops his own wood, and even brews his own tipple. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a hermit. For the first time, Ken shares the story of his life. From his working-class origins in Derbyshire,...

This debut book by bloggers Sherry and John Petersik is filled with hundreds of fun, deceptively simple, budget-friendly ideas for sprucing up a home.

It had been nearly a century since elephants had lived in Southern Zululand, South Africa, where Lawrence Anthony founded his Thula Thula wildlife reserve. Yet one day a phone call changed all that. A troubled, unpredictable herd needed a new home. In order to save their lives, Lawrence took them in, and in the years that followed found that they had a lot to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom. He tells of hair-raising fights with poachers,...

Ralph Moody, just turned twenty, had only a dime in his pocket when he was put off a freight in western Nebraska. It was the Fourth of July in 1919. Three months later he owned eight teams of horses and rigs to go with them. Everyone who worked with him shared in the prosperity - the widow whose wheat crop was saved and the group of misfits who formed a first-rate harvesting crew. But sometimes fickle Mother Nature and frail human nature made sure...

1957, Paris. A cheap no-name hotel becomes a haven for a new breed of artists struggling to free themselves from the conformity and censorship of America. Called the Beat hotel, it soon became an epicenter of the beat generation. This revelatory new documentary delves deep into this amazing place and time. Fleeing the obscenity trials surrounding the publication of Howl, Allen Ginsberg, along with Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, happened upon the...

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas recalls the celebration of Christmas with his family and the feelings it evoked in him as a child.