In a book that draws on both personal stories and research presents an in-depth exploration of the practical, medical and moral issues that trouble pet owners confronted with the decline and death of their companion animals.
Losing a pet is a deeply painful experience, yet often misunderstood by many who see the beloved pet as "Just a pet." Our Last Walk: Using Poetry for Grieving and Remembering Our Pets is a powerful resource for those experiencing pet loss and those who are supporting others who have lost a pet. Filled with powerful, authentic poems expressing loss, Our Last Walk helps the grieving person find words for their loss while sharing in the experience of others who have traversed that same painful journey. More than a book of tears, Our Last Walk also helps people to remember their beloved pet, preserving the love and memories of relationship. Through this book, many will find encouragement, healing, and hope.
In 1909, Edward Payson Weston walked from New York to San Francisco, covering around 40 miles a day and greeted by wildly cheering audiences in every city. The New York Times called it the "first bona-fide walk ... across the American continent," and eagerly chronicled a journey in which Weston was beset by fatigue, mosquitos, vicious headwinds, and brutal heat. He was 70 years old. In The Last Great Walk, journalist Wayne Curtis uses the framework of Weston's fascinating and surprising story, and investigates exactly what we lost when we turned away from foot travel, and what we could potentially regain with America's new embrace of pedestrianism. From how our brains and legs evolved to accommodate our ancient traveling needs to the way that American cities have been designed to cater to cars and discourage pedestrians, Curtis guides readers through an engaging, intelligent exploration of how something as simple as the way we get from one place to another continues to shape our health, our environment, and even our national identity. Not walking, he argues, may be one of the most radical things humans have ever done.
You are invited to share in a family's last walk on their block.An unexpected family reunion leads three brothers and their sister back home. Traveling from all parts of the USA, they soon find themselves once again walking the block of their Long Island upbringing. They take steps back to their past in a moving and touching journey in time that takes them from the 1950's through to the 1960's and beyond.Revisiting their roots, upbringing and past they reconnect with their long gone childhood years, recapturing moments of their Dad's missing memory due to his long lost battle with Alzheimers.Their stroll is filled with lovingly shared adventures, wholesome family values, inspiring neighborly virtues, motherly love and fatherly guidance.Set in the 50's and 60's in a most restful village in middle America, true life comes vividly back to reality in this awe-inspiring path to the past. Personal, humorous, and charming neighborhood reflections based on motivating and enlivened homespun memories line their journey.A time long gone by comes roaring back to life in this personal reflection!Join The Last Walk on Our Block and relive your own memories of life as we all knew it.
This memoir of Jewish family history is also a documentation of atrocities inflicted by the fascist militia during the German occupation of Eastern Europe. It is a personal account of the legacy of the Holocaust.
A transformative collection of essays on the power of walking to connect with ourselves, each other, and nature itself. In 2010, Jonathon Stalls and his blue-heeler husky mix began their 242-day walk across the United States, depending upon each other and the kindness of strangers along the way. In this collection of essays, Stalls explores walking as waking up: how a cross-country journey through the family farms of West Virginia, the deep freedom of Nevada’s High desert, and everywhere in between unlocked connections to his deepest aches and dreams--and opened new avenues for renewal, connection, and change. While most of us won’t walk or roll across the country, the deep wisdom and insights that Stalls receives from the people, land, and animals he meets on his pilgrimage have profound impacts for each of us. He shares how walking deepened his relationship to himself as a gay man, offering deep and clarifying emotional medicine. He confronts the systemic racism, classism, and ableism that shape and reshape the communities he walks through. And he invites readers to become awakened activists, to begin healing our culture’s profound separation from the natural world. WALK is for those who crave to feel and embody, not just know and study, their way through complex themes that live in each chapter: vulnerability, human dignity, presence, mystery, and resistance. With dedicated practices--like connecting to Earth stewardship, moving into vulnerability, and walking and rolling with intention--Stalls’ WALK is an urgent and glorious call to slow down, look around, and engage with the world in front of us. It awakens us to what we miss when we’re driving by, flying over, and rushing past what surrounds us. It’s an invitation to move, to connect, to participate deeply in the world--and to dissolve the barriers that disconnect us from each other and the living Earth.
Inspiration meets adventure in Barry's book that chronicles the tragicdeath of his teenage son, Kevin, due to alcohol poisoning, and his epic, 1,400-mile journey, from Arizona to Montana, with Kevin's ashes in his backpack. With a sense of humor that is rare among parents who have lost achild, Barry's book is a combination of faith, inspiration and adventure. Yup, his book will make you laugh, cry, and when you finish his book, you will simply smile. Everyparent that reads Barry's story will hug their precious children a littletighter. Barry wrote this book with audiences of all ages in mind. In movieterms it is rated "G."
A collection of Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson's acclaimed journalism. Hilarious, heartbreaking, provocative, and affecting--Howard Jacobson's irresistible journalism from the Independent reveals the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist in all his humanity. From the tiniest absurdities to the most universal joys and desolations, Jacobson writes with a thunder, passion, and wit unmatched. Just as did his previous volume, Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It, this glorious, unputdownable collection will delight, entertain, challenge, and move.
God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey. An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.