Lyrical and sensual, this is the true story of a love doomed from the start, but saved by two people who simply would not give up on each other.

Meet Zelda Gamson: 87 years old, widow to a famous sociologist, still cutting her own bangs, and looking back on a life whose shape is only beginning to emerge. She, too, was a tenured professor; she's been a mother, a dancer, an activist, a householder, and an early expert in "gig work" and "code-switching" before either term was coined. In "Don't Play Like a Girl: A Midcentury Woman Leaps Into Life," Gamson tells the story of how she forged her own path even when her choices were limited and her way unclear. From getting pepper-sprayed at a Vietnam War protest to being drugged without her consent during the birth of her first child to finding her bliss alone on an island, Gamson shares a funny, harrowing, lively tale with an intimate perspective on universal questions. How can we give to others while still holding onto our essential selves? What should young women now understand about how quickly their right to self-determination can vanish? How do we live with joy amidst turmoil? Wise and warm, "Don't Play Like a Girl" offers a relevant, instructive vision for a contemporary world that demands unprecedented improvisation. People of her generation and her fellow academics, activists, and fun-lovers will return to their youth with Zelda Gamson. Young women and young men will love and learn with an elder who still feels like they do.

If you loved David and his story, you'll definitely love these activities that he's put together for you! Have a good time as you learn more important lessons from David in a bright and colorful way!

Love, lust, and the convulsions of history surge through this dazzling novel about the vanished cosmopolitan world of Alexandria.

William Shatner, known and loved as Star Trek's Captain James T. Kirk, delivers more suspense adventure in this latest novel in the Tek series. Critics have hailed his best-selling debut novel, TekWar, as being "as tough and scrappy as Captain Kirk" (The Wall Street Journal), praised TekLords for its "fast-paced action, high-tech gloss" (Library Journal), and called the author of TekLab "a good writer" of whom they "await his next" (Nashville Banner). In Tek Vengeance, investigator Jake Cardigan faces his most dangerous - and most heartbreaking - job ever. Beautiful Beth Kittridge, whom he has come to love more and more after rescuing her from the drug-dealing Teklords in TekWar, must go to Berlin to testify against one of the most dangerous Teklords of all. Jake wants to protect her - but he has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to obtain information from the dying daughter of a former Tek operative in Brazil. She'll talk only to Jake, and so he has no choice but to go, hoping to be back in time to travel with Beth. But as one thing after another seems to conspire to keep Jake and his sidekick, Gomez, busy in Brazil, he can't help but think he's been set up - and that Beth is in deadly danger. From Brazil to Berlin to Vienna, Jake and Gomez are off on a chase that may spell the end for the dealers in the vicious electronic drug Tek. This time Jake has the help of Dan, his son, who appears finally to believe that his father is one of the good guys, as well as that of the colorful cast of characters - human and robot - that fans of the world of Tek have come to expect

The real story behind “ex-gay” ministries and reparative therapy! Nationally known activist Wayne Besen spent four years examining the phenomenon of “ex-gay” ministries and reparative therapies—interviewing leaders, attending conferences, and visiting ministries undercover as he accumulated hundreds of hours of research. The result is Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, a groundbreaking exposé of the controversial movement that's revered by independent religious groups and reviled by gay and lesbian organizations. The book presents a historical perspective on the dispute, examining “ex-gay” groups such as Love In Action, Exodus International, Homosexuals Anonymous, and profiling a cast of characters that includes Pat Robertson, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, “ex-gay” poster boy John Paulk, National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality activist Richard Cohen, and psychiatrist Dr. Robert Spitzer. An in-depth, well-researched, and historically significant account, Anything but Straight is full of startling facts and alarming surprises. The original content and novel material in the book includes: a first-ever comprehensive history of the “ex-gay” ministries and “reparative therapy” the inside story of the night the author photographed “ex-gay” poster boy John Paulk inside a gay bar the author's discovery that Anne Paulk lied about being a lesbian and has admitted to having a strong attraction to men BEFORE she became “ex-gay” previously undisclosed bizarre techniques used by the “ex-gay” ministries and “reparative therapists” the author's exclusive in-depth interviews with leading “ex-gay” leaders—they disclose their deepest secrets, hidden desires, and true motivations an extraordinary new study that shows that most “ex-gay” leaders have suffered from substance abuse or severe emotional problems—while many “ex-gay” leaders claim they were “unhappy being gay,” this report helps prove that their dissatisfactions came not from their homosexuality, but from poor life choices and irresponsible behavior new revelations that one of the nation's leading “reparative therapists” hailed from a secretive cult that was scandalized for practicing nude therapy From the author: Through my extensive experience, I have learned that the extraordinary claims made by the “ex-gay” groups are without merit and the efficacy of their programs is dubious at best and harmful at worst . . . One frequent question I get is, “Why can't gay activists simply leave 'ex-gay' groups alone and let them go about their business?” This is exactly what happened for nearly three decades while “ex-gay” groups labored in near anonymity. But all this recently changed when the “ex-gay” groups intricately aligned themselves with the anti-gay political agenda of the Religious Right. With “ex-gays” added to their arsenal, the Right could disingenuously claim to love gay people and offer them “hope for change,” while simultaneously fighting for punitive legislation. Their insidious message: Since gays and lesbians can change, there is no need for laws that protect them against arbitrary prejudice. Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth is an essential read for activists on both sides of the “ex-gay” fence, family members of gays and lesbians, Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, and Transgender church members, psychiatric and social science professionals, and anyone who has dealt with “coming out” issues. An appendix of resources and a helpful bibliography make it easy to find additional information on this fascinating topic.

"The titular character, Ghalen, is a brilliant young Black man who is the son of an endearing neurodivergent man and a gifted, astute, and empathic woman. His parents' grand love story takes up the first third of the book and sets you up to know Ghalen so fully and invest in this family (and their extended friend/family) so deeply, that each new twist and turn feels personal. The journey through Ghalen's coming-of-age tale, as he ventures out into the world is marked with peaks and valleys and such a drive that you can't help but strap in for it all, while not wanting it to end"-- Provided by publisher.

Born in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, Walter Mehring inherited both his father's respect for the civilizing power of literature and his formidable library of thousands of books. Like his father, believed that books and reading were essential to progress, mutual understanding, and contentment. After having served in World War I, Mehring spent the years between the world wars as part of the exhilarating avant-garde coffeehouse culture of Europe's capitals; he himself was a poet, cabaret lyricist, and founder of the Dadaist movement in Berlin. But with the rise of fascism, Europe became a dangerous place for free-thinking artists. Mehring never envisioned that the culture of books celebrated in his father's library would be rejected by the sudden rise to prominence of the Nationalist Socialist Party. Soon, even his own books were burned by the Brownshirts and Mehring was forced to roam Europe as a literary fugitive. From a precarious exile in Vienna, he arranged for his father's books to be smuggled out of Germany, but their fate would be worse than his--while Mehring managed to slip out of Austria and avoid capture, his library was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. In The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture , translated by Richard and Clara Winston and presented in paperback for the first time, Mehring takes the reader with him as he unpacks the crates of books in his mind, and in the process recalls what each book meant to him and his father. Writing with wit and insight, Mehring successfully compares the humanism of his father's era with the chaos of Europe at war, using his father's library as a metaphor for how the optimism of nineteenth-century progress gave way to the disorder and book-burning of the twentieth. "It is with love and not a little bitterness that the author touches on the various tomes of his father's library [and through them] on the history of man's ideas, on the magnificence of our cultural progress, . . . and on the eventual destruction of the beauty and ideals that man had been able to create. . . . Beautifully conceived and beautifully executed."-- The Atlantic "Whoever cares for books will love this book about books."-- New York Times " The Lost Library cannot be read without profit."-- Times Literary Supplement

Miserable at an elegant day school for girls, Victoria Coren finds an escape in the mysterious world of poker. Twenty years later, she has won a million dollars and forgotten to have children. What price adventure? This is a true story of happiness and heartbreak, smoke and mirrors, bright lights and shady characters. It is a memoir of friendship and belonging, love and loss. It might also teach you how to win a million . . .

In an age of upheaval and challenged faith, traditional heroes are hard to come by, and harder still to love, with their bloodstained hands and backs unbowed by the consequences of their actions. Through penetrating readings of key works of modern European literature, Victor Brombert shows how a new kind of hero—the antihero—has arisen to replace the toppled heroic model. Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs: deficiency translated into strength, failure experienced as honesty, dignity achieved through humiliation. Brombert explores these paradoxes in the works of Büchner, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Svevo, Hašek, Frisch, Camus, and Levi. Coming from diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers all use the figure of the antihero to question handed-down assumptions, to reexamine moral categories, and to raise issues of survival and renewal embodying the spirit of an uneasy age.

U.A. Fanthorpe's Christmas Poems gathers together the poems she wrote and sent to friends as Christmas cards from 1974 to 2002. Now readers can enjoy Fanthorpe's yearly output in its entirety. Her subject matter covers a broad range of seasonal characters, from angels to personified Christmas trees, and a variety of styles to match, from moments of beautiful lyricism to the comically touching Gloucestershire foxes begging baby Jesus to visit: 'Come live wi we under Westridge / Where the huntin folk be few'. Fanthorpe is witty and highly original, rethinking the Christmas story from quirky angles, to create her own alternative Christmas legend – from the cat and the sheep-dog left out of the stable, to the wicked fairy's gifts for Jesus. Above all, these poems are celebrations of Christmas joy and love.

"Jane has it all. Clothes, money, and a beautiful home high above the city. But her safe little world is shattered the minute she meets Silver. Brilliant, witty, a gifted musician, kind, understanding, and gorgeous, Silver is the perfect man - except that he is a robot. Jane wants Silver like she's never wanted anything or anyone before. But it's different with robots - you can't just ask them out, you have to buy them! Jane's best friend, Egyptia, already owns him and she is enjoying her new toy very much. Consumed by love's fever, Jane sells everything she has and makes promises she can't keep to possess Silver. She leaves her suburban mansion in the clouds for the ancient inner-city slums. Jane and her silver metal lover rent a dingy apartment. Together they scrape for a living and sing for their supper. But people and robots were not meant to be lovers. The powers-that-be are jealous of machine love. Will Jane and Silver escape the robophobe's revenge? Can their flesh and metal union survive the slings and arrows of an intolerant, high-tech world?"--Cover.

A group of resourceful kids start solution-seekers.com, a website where cybervisitors can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of S words that reveal a spectacular story! With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The S Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

The second children's book by famous author and actor Tina Louise, 'What Does A Bee Do?' takes a fun and whimsical approach to a very important environmental issue: the plight of the world's bee population. Written for young kids, the book starts with a simple question 'What does a bee do?' From there the story unfolds with three brightly illustrated children and an adorable honey bee who explains that she does much more than make honey. She's responsible for most of the fruits, vegetables and nuts that we love to eat! Colorful, educational and a great environmental message on the importance of our bees and what we can do to help them. Ages 3+Tina Louise is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a lifetime member of the Actors Studio. As a literacy advocate, she has been a Learning Leaders volunteer in New York for over a decade and has been helping students gain not only literacy skills, but also confidence, self-determination and proof of their potential

'At 29 I got married to live the life of the perfect wife with the gorgeous children. I did that for ten years, the last four of which I was completely celibate. Then I went online and everything changed...' After a love affair with a man three thousand miles away, met online, Suzanne Portnoy - mother of two and a top executive in the entertainment industry - begins her sexual reawakening. Embarking on a sensational and prolific series of liaisons, Suzanne beds a top London chef, who cooks her a five star meal on the day her husband moves out. An affair with a famous men's magazine editor quickly ensues, followed by a top cameraman who takes pictures of Suzanne naked. But this is just the beginning. Insatiable, Suzanne dives into the swinging scene and works her way through an entire spectrum of sexual experience, including exhibitionism, group sex, fetish clubs, and a predilection for picking up men in her lunch hour. Suzanne's journey of self-discovery is anything but typical; her attitude towards sex and relationships is even more unusual. The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker is a story that is shocking and heart-warming in equal measure. Freed from the restraints of marriage and monogamy, Suzanne takes pleasure without commitment and tells her story without a trace of shame. She's not looking for Prince Charming anymore, but fun. And she finds it. 'Taking the vogue for erotic memoirs to the extreme ... as mind boggling as it is shocking' The Mirror 'Intelligently written [and] brutally honest' Metro 'Eye-poppingly unambiguous prose' Esquire 'Book of the Month' Scarlet

INCLUDES SPECIALLY COMMISSIONED LINE DRAWINGS Little Tiger is not like other tigers. Not content to spend her days alone, roaming the snow forests of Siberia hunting prey, she prefers instead to ponder the ways of the world. One day, eager to discover her own place within it, she sets out on a remarkable journey to discover the secret of life, and to meet the creatures she has heard most about: humans. A moving tale of bravery and spirit, The Tiger and the Acrobat is a celebration of the power of friendship, and a testament to the courage it takes to be true to ourselves. 'This book is a beaut.' Cecelia Ahern, author of P.S. I Love You

Baseball, first dubbed the "national pastime" in print in 1856, is the country's most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball's greatest charm--a clockless suspension of time--is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position--in reality and myth--in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War--when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps--to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online "fantasy baseball" to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather's bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball's history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

" Inspired by treasured family memoirs and musings, Susan J. Gordon' s work strikes a chord of connections in the hearts of her many readers. Many of her early childhood experiences were instrumental in shaping her lifelong love of writing. " Most of her pieces are about universal topics such as marriage, family life, parenting, being Jewish, family histories, and growing up in a family of divorce. Over the years, they were published in many well-known, popular magazines and newspapers. " ' Childhood is as fleeting as falling leaves,' Gordon says, ' and home is where we can find our way in the dark. There are no secrets in families-- just things no one wants to talk about. The past is always present, I believe, whether or not we are conscious of it.' " -- Anne Garry, former Managing Editor of Victoria " Gordon' s research on the historical context of relatives' lives, and her explorations of family secrets and myths are models for the genealogical community." -- Renee Steinig, genealogist and former president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Long Island

Bernadette Inez O'Brian Schwartz is back with her friends Annie, Keisha, and Megan, aka The Lunch Bunch. In this third adventure, Bernadette finally gets the puppy she has been dreaming of for so long. She asks her Lunch Bunch friends to help out at her street's garage sale to raise money to save the animals of the rainforest. When school ends, the four friends decide to go to the same day camp. Bernadette discovers that she can indulge her love of science anywhere when the local frogs go missing and she and the other campers use "scientific method" to find out why.

In an irreverent, witty, and splendidly sensual voice, Dr.Susan Block lays down the laws for giving each other unequaled erotic pleasure. It takes more than learning new techniques to lead a sexually satisfying life: It takes knowledge of your partner's needs, hopes and fantasies. The 10 Commandments of Pleasure playfully leads you down the path to erotic delight - and provides you with the keys to unlocking each other's deepest desires. Follow these golden rules and learn: the power of giving pleasure, the 10 Commandments of a Lady's and a Gentleman's Pleasure, how to love the "Bonobo Way", how to discover and activate each other's personal "pleasure points", how to find the elusive "P" and "G" spots, how to be an "ethical hedonist", and how to have a "toegasm".