Provides a close-up examination of the instability and uncertainty that plague the children of prisoners, in a collection of personal, anecdotal accounts that chronicle their attempts to cope with the unique challenges in their lives.
The Powerful, Poignant Story of Love, Courage, and Redemption from Death Row, Where an Indomitable Woman Challenged Corruption in Order to Free her Husband When TV reporter Jodie Sinclair went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as the Death House at Angola, in 1981, she expected to report about the death penalty and leave. She never expected to fall in love. Billy Sinclair was an inmate at Angola, sent there for an accidental murder during a robbery gone wrong. After facing a trial which was skewed against him and being sentenced to death, he saw first-hand the corruption and abuse rife in the criminal justice system, and he began an unrelenting crusade for reform. When the pair married by proxy a year after meeting, Jodie took up Billy’s fight. From then on, she lived with one foot in the outside world and one in the complex and dehumanizing bureaucracy of the prison world. This incredible memoir tracks her heroic twenty-five-year fight to save her husband from dying in prison, the professional setbacks she suffered for marrying a prisoner, and a pardons scandal in which she wore a wire for the FBI to help her husband expose corruption in the criminal justice system leading all the way to the governor's office, which put a target on Billy's back. It is the uplifting true story of a woman who stood by her man, and in doing so, exposed the horrors of our criminal justice system and became a voice for all those who have loved ones behind bars.
With charming original illustrations, this book celebrates fifty of the Big Apple’s storied taverns, legendary dives, and bars and the drink recipes that will inspire you to become a regular. For cocktail enthusiasts and those seeking the most real New York watering holes, this is a comprehensive guide to the city’s legendary bars, taverns, and dives across all five boroughs, featuring stories, insider tips, and delicious cocktail recipes. From McSorley’s in the East Village and the West Village’s Ear Inn, to Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, and Fort Defiance in Red Hook, Brooklyn, this book spans New York’s five boroughs, each entry combining an intoxicating mix of history, local color, and city lore. It includes tips like the best times of day to visit, or whether to choose bar or table, along with signature cocktail recipes, and witty sidebars on topics such as day drinking versus night drinking. Painting an intimate picture of each featured place accompanied by charming illustrations, this book stands out from typical New York City guidebooks on the market and will interest New York City tourists and natives alike, as well as cocktail enthusiasts and general bons vivants.
In April of 2000, Gary Erickson turned down a $120 million offer to buy his thriving company. Today, instead of taking it easy for the rest of his life and enjoying a luxurious retirement, he's working harder than ever. Why would any sane person pass up the financial opportunity of a lifetime? Raising the Bar tells the amazing story of Clif Bar's Gary Erickson and shows that some things are more important than money. Gary Erickson and coauthor Lois Lorentzen tell the unusual and inspiring story about following your passion, the freedom to create, sustaining a business over the long haul, and living responsibly in your community and on the earth. Raising the Bar chronicles Clif Bar's ascent from a homemade energy bar to a $100 million phenomenon with an estimated 35 million consumers, and a company hailed by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. four years in a row. The book is filled with compelling personal stories from Erickson's life-trekking in the Himalayan mountains, riding his bicycle over roadless European mountain passes, climbing in the Sierra Nevada range--as inspiration for his philosophy of business. Throughout the book, Erickson--a competitive cyclist, jazz musician, world traveler, mountain climber, wilderness guide, and entrepreneur--convinces us that sustaining one's employees, community, and environment is good business. If you are a manager, executive, business owner, or board member, Raising the Bar is your personal guide to corporate integrity. If you are a sports enthusiast, environmentalist, adventure lover, intrigued by a unique corporate culture, or just interested in a good story, Raising the Bar is for you.
“Venkatraman has never met a heavy theme she did not like....Borrowing elements of fable, it's told with a recurring sense of awe by a boy whom the world, for most of his life, has existed only in stories.”—New York Times Book Review The author of the award-winning The Bridge Home brings readers another gripping novel set in Chennai, India, featuring a boy who's unexpectedly released into the world after spending his whole life in jail with his mom. Kabir has been in jail since the day he was born, because his mom is serving time for a crime she didn't commit. He's never met his dad, so the only family he's got are their cellmates, and the only place he feels the least bit free is in the classroom, where his kind teacher regales him with stories of the wonders of the outside world. Then one day a new warden arrives and announces Kabir is too old to stay. He gets handed over to a long-lost "uncle" who unfortunately turns out to be a fraud, and intends to sell Kabir. So Kabir does the only thing he can--run away as fast as his legs will take him. How does a boy with nowhere to go and no connections make his way? Fortunately, he befriends Rani, another street kid, and she takes him under her wing. But plotting their next move is hard--and fraught with danger--in a world that cares little for homeless, low caste children. This is not the world Kabir dreamed of--but he's discovered he's not the type to give up. Kabir is ready to show the world that he--and his mother--deserve a place in it.
Chronically questioning, funny, and bold, a young American explores the majority-Muslim lands that scare him most. Armed only with college Arabic and restless curiosity, Adam Valen Levinson sets out to “learn about the world 9/11 made us fear.” From a base in globalized and sterilized Abu Dhabi, he sets out to lunch in Taliban territory in Afghanistan, travels under the watchful eye of Syria’s secret police, risks shipwreck en route to Somalia, investigates Yazidi beliefs in a sacred cave, cliff dives in Oman, celebrates New Year’s Eve in Tahrir Square, and, at every turn, discovers a place that matches not at all with its reputation. Valen Levinson crosses borders with wisecracking humor, erudition, and humanity, seeking common ground with “bros” everywhere, and finding that people who pray differently often laugh the same. And as a young man bar mitzvahed eight years late, he slowly learns how childish it is to live by decisions and distinctions born of fear.
A darkly comic foray into the world of men and women who fake their own deaths, the consultants who help them disappear, and the private investigators who’ll stop at nothing to bring them back to life. “A delightful read for anyone tantalized by the prospect of disappearing without a trace.” —Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake “Delivers all the lo-fi spy shenanigans and caught-red-handed schadenfreude you’re hoping for.” —NPR “A lively romp.” —The Boston Globe “Grim fun.” —The New York Times “Brilliant topic, absorbing book.” —The Seattle Times “The most literally escapist summer read you could hope for.” —The Paris Review Is it still possible to fake your own death in the twenty-first century? With six figures of student loan debt, Elizabeth Greenwood was tempted to find out. So off she sets on a darkly comic foray into the world of death fraud, where for $30,000 a consultant can make you disappear—but your suspicious insurance company might hire a private detective to dig up your coffin...only to find it filled with rocks. Greenwood tracks down a British man who staged a kayaking accident and then returned to live in his own house while all his neighbors thought he was dead. She takes a call from Michael Jackson (no, he’s not dead—or so her new acquaintances would have her believe), stalks message boards for people contemplating pseudocide, and gathers intel on black market morgues in the Philippines, where she may or may not obtain some fraudulent goodies of her own. Along the way, she learns that love is a much less common motive than money, and that making your death look like a drowning virtually guarantees that you’ll be caught. (Disappearing while hiking, however, is a way great to go.) Playing Dead is a charmingly bizarre investigation in the vein of Jon Ronson and Mary Roach into our all-too-human desire to escape from the lives we lead, and the men and women desperate enough to give up their lives—and their families—to start again.
Macho Love: Sex Behind Bars in Central America is the first in-depth study of sexual culture and AIDS in Latin prisons. Psychologists, social workers, criminologists, and AIDS specialists will discover how the interplay of sexual ideals, prostitution, manipulation, resistance, and power relationships among prisoners and some staff are based on money, sex, drugs, and violence. Macho Love gives you a stirring and emotional look at the various risks and dangers lurking in the Latin American prison culture and discusses how Costa Rican and Central American prisons are improving the situation with new intervention programs. Fascinating and informative, Macho Love explores the dangerous Latin prison culture as it discusses: new HIV/AIDS prevention programs implemented in some Costa Rican and Central American prisons the frequency and types of prostitution and rape in prison drug and alcohol addiction and their effects on the spread of HIV/AIDS an understanding of why rehabilitation programs fail or succeed the lack of opportunities to work or to study that leaves the inmates vulnerable to the only freedom they have left--sex why a “cachero,” or a man who penetrates another man, is not considered a homosexual and often refuses to wear a condom, which tremendously increases the risk of HIV/AIDS Macho Love explores the life-threatening sexual culture in prisons to bring you the realities of the Latin prison culture. This revealing book examines the different types of relationships which occur in prisons and the factors that place inmates at risk for contracting the HIV virus, such as not wearing a condom because of intoxication due to drugs and alcohol. Macho Love also shows you how the new HIV/AIDS intervention programs in Costa Rica are combatting these serious problems to lower HIV infection rates and avoid the spread of this deadly and dangerous disease.
In her beautifully crafted memoir, Jodi Melsness finds herself caring for her mother after her father's death from cancer. Warned by her father that her mother is becoming more forgetful, Jodi begins caring for her from afar, first commuting to and from her family home in her beloved hometown, then moving her mother to assisted living and finally to memory care. All the while, she is raising a family and working as a nurse, specifically with home care, hospice, and memory care. Anyone who has cared for a loved one with memory loss will identify with this moving journey of a loving daughter navigating the ups and downs of the Alzheimer's disease that has stricken her beloved mother. And how she carries on even when her mother forgets her name and face. The Lemon Bar Queen is a touching and sometimes humorous take on loving a person who has lost her thoughts and memories but finds comfort in coffee, the Dairy Queen, bingo, and a stuffed animal named Blue Dog. And it illustrates the grief of a daughter whose training in the field makes slowly and painfully losing her mother no easier. Book jacket.
Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation’s jails every year. What happens to them as they gestate their pregnancies in a space of punishment? Using her ethnographic fieldwork and clinical work as an Ob/Gyn in a women’s jail, Carolyn Sufrin explores how, in this time when the public safety net is frayed and incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor, jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of pregnant, incarcerated women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them, Jailcare describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. Sufrin argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish. Rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women’s lives and their reproduction, jail can become a safety net for women on the margins of society.