THE COMING OF THE BLIGHT It seemed as though the world was eroding right under everyone's feet. Stories disappeared from magazines; the baron's silver coat of arms, polished in the morning, was pitted with corrosion by afternoon; toadstools were springing up from every corner. And these were but the first signs of the coming plague, a cancerous orgy of patternless vitality seeking to engulf the world... TO STEM THE TIDE Carefree Johnny Curlon, indelicately plucked from his fishing boat one evening, is bluntly informed by high powers that he is a man destined for a role in great affairs: only his unique powers can prevent the coming probability crisis that threatens to turn the world into bubbling chaos...

In the bestselling tradition of Augusten Burroughs, a compassionate, witty, and completely candid memoir that chronicles growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder. When all the neighborhood kids were playing outdoors, seven-year-old Traci Foust was inside making sure the miniature Catholic saint statues on her windowsill always pointed north, scratching out bald patches on her scalp, and snapping her fingers after every utterance of the word God. As Traci grew older, her OCD blossomed to include panic attacks and bizarre behaviors, including a fear of the sun, an obsession with contracting eradicated diseases, and the idea that she could catch herself on fire just by thinking about it. While stints of therapy -- and lots of Nyquil -- sometimes helped, nothing alleviated the fact that her single mother and mid-life crisis father had no idea how to deal with her. Traci Foust shares her wacky and compelling journey with brutal honesty, from becoming a teenage runaway on the poetry slam beat in the hippie beach towns of Northern California to living at a family-owned nursing home, in a room with a seventy-five- year-old WWII Vet who kept mistaking her for a prostitute. In this funny, frenetic, and wonderfully dark-humored account of her struggles with a variety of psychological disorders, Traci ultimately concludes that there is nothing special about being “normal.”

Following the loss of his mother, fifteen-year-old Will Douglas is on a self-destructive path to nowhere, and as fate would have it, that’s exactly where he’s heading. Will’s father ships him off to a Southern Baptist boys home in the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi—a stretch of hostile backcountry, populated by duct-taped trailers and backward beliefs. Surrounded by teenage castoffs and criminals, Will must survive the next 90 days under the iron-fisted rule of Brother Bennett, “a man of firm discipline and faith.” However, as Will soon discovers, Brother Bennett’s modes of discipline are even more extreme than his beliefs. Licks and yuckings become a part of his everyday life, and after Brother Bennett dishes out the most brutal beating he has ever witnessed, Will decides he has to find a way out of Nowhere, for the sake of his own safety. But nothing in Nowhere is ever that simple, and instead of finding a way out, Will finds himself falling for a girl he meets at church. Being around her feels like being somewhere else, like being someone else. But seeing her means breaking Brother Bennett’s rules. All he has to do is keep his head down and make it through the rest of his sentence, but some things are simply worth the risk, even if it means staying in the last place he wants to be. Set in the spring of 1990 and based on true events, Nowhere, Mississippi is an in-your-face coming of age novel that opens a door into the violence and corruption of private reform schools throughout the United States.

A new approach to help kids with ADHD and LD succeed in and outside the classroom This groundbreaking book addresses the consequences of the unabated stress associated with Learning disabilities and ADHD and the toxic, deleterious impact of this stress on kids' academic learning, social skills, behavior, and efficient brain functioning. Schultz draws upon three decades of work as a neuropsychologist, teacher educator, and school consultant to address this gap. This book can help change the way parents and teachers think about why kids with LD and ADHD find school and homework so toxic. It will also offer an abundant supply of practical, understandable strategies that have been shown to reduce stress at school and at home. Offers a new way to look at why kids with ADHD/LD struggle at school Provides effective strategies to reduce stress in kids with ADHD and LD Includes helpful rating scales, checklists, and printable charts to use at school and home This important resource is written by a faculty member of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry and former classroom teacher.

By all appearances, John Lennon was working on a tell-all memoir in the final years of his life. Every day he poured into diaries his raw thoughts and feelings—about his jealous rivalry with Paul McCartney; his tumultuous marriage to Yoko Ono; his love for his sons, Julian and Sean; his hatred of the music business; his escape into programmed dreams; his acerbic opinions of England and America. Written by one of the few people to have read those diaries, and based on decades of research, Nowhere Man takes you on a journey through Lennon's consciousness. Covering a range of topics close to John's heart, from Abbey Road to the zodiac, the book offers vivid insights into his extraordinary life. It examines his passion for money, his forceful rejection of a Beatles reunion, his drug use, his forays into the occult, his brief acceptance of Jesus, and his solitary struggle in the Dakota to create a meaningful life in the glaring spotlight of fame. A portrait of an artist in turmoil striving to reconnect with his muse—which culminates with the release of Double Fantasy, his final album—Nowhere Man is an unforgettable look at Lennon's last years and the tragic fate of a beloved cultural icon whose transcendent music changed the world.

I never thought that I would be here. Things like this happened to other people. Not to me ... I was about to be fired. In a small Midwestern town, a school superintendent commits social suicide when he divorces his wife. He’s shocked when his marriage collapses, but he’s even more bewildered by the community’s reaction. He is now the sinner, pariah, and villain. For someone who so loves the limelight, this is not the attention he wants, so he does his best to escape, seeking solace on the open road. Even far away from home, though, he’s haunted by what awaits him when he gets back. He’s not prepared for the hateful glares from neighbors or bloodthirsty school board members, his particular nemeses. Death and divorce, despair and disillusionment, follow this man as he faces life-altering changes in his personal and professional lives. Without his marriage, who is he? Without his career, what is he? He is forced to face problems and flee others all while struggling to reinvent himself. Robbed of the joys he once knew, he must find a new purpose, eventually realizing that rebirth is painful but worth the reward.

As a teenager, Ron Reynolds trekked across the United States and overseas in quest of adventure. Stints as carnival worker, ranch hand, cabana boy, and lifeguard to a deckhand on the China seas could not quench his thirst for excitement. Until the nineteen-year-old Buffalo, New York, adventurer saw a poster in Paris, luring him to a five-year enlistment in the famed French Foreign Legion. For eighteen months that dream became a horrible nightmare of senseless desert killings and brutal and sadistic treatment, including a thirty-day imprisonment in a desert dungeon at the hands of a half-crazed Turk. Finally, after two unsuccessful attempts to escape, in which he barely survived the punishments, Ron was determined to make it to freedom or take his own life by falling on his bayonet. His daring escape, filled with terror and suspense, was bittersweet. The Yankee mercenary found himself a man without a country and a price on his head by the French government. In essence, he had escaped to nowhere. He says that if he had to do it over again, he would take the easy way out—in front of a firing squad. On a happy note, Ron Reynolds is once again an American citizen.

Pilgrimage to Nowhere: Coming of Age (1956-59)is the story of Nick Pappas, born an American citizen in Greece on the eve of World War II. From the cradle, he knew the horrors and deprivation of war. He saw heroism and treachery, survival and death. Then, in 1946, he arrived, a repatriated citizen, at Ellis Island with his aging father, shell-shocked mother, and older brother, Paul. Raised in Chicago's Greek ghetto, Nick is the eternal immigrant – with one foot in Greece and the other in America. He becomes a moral rebel, unwilling to join his brother's academic crowd or the wayward, delinquent crowd, seeking a security of his own, without conformity, the usual price for security. In 1956, now a drop-out from high school, Nick is talked into joining the Air Force and the rebel becomes an Air Policeman, the symbol of authority in the occupied lands of the Philippines. He meets and eventually falls in love with a native Filipino, Helena. When his actions impact on others, the rebel learns that there is always some price to pay. The adventures of this young man, coming of age in a foreign land, become a moral pilgrimage. AUTHOR BIO: Pete was born an American citizen in war-torn Greece and came to America in 1946. He was an airman, restaurateur, even candidate for Congress, but always a rebel. He wrote with the logic of his Greek homeland and the rebellion of his transplanted soul. Pete died 11/2/99.

A fascinating analysis of anonymous publication centuries before the digital age Everywhere and Nowhere considers the ubiquity of anonymity and mediation in the publication and circulation of eighteenth-century British literature—before the Romantic creation of the “author”—and what this means for literary criticism. Anonymous authorship was typical of the time, yet literary scholars and historians have been generally unable to account for it as anything more than a footnote or curiosity. Mark Vareschi shows the entangled relationship between mediation and anonymity, revealing the nonhuman agency of the printed text. Drawing richly on quantitative analysis and robust archival work, Vareschi brings together philosophy, literary theory, and media theory in a trenchant analysis, uncovering a history of textual engagement and interpretation that does not hinge on the known authorial subject. In discussing anonymous poetry, drama, and the novel along with anonymously published writers such as Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, and Walter Scott, he unveils a theory of mediation that renews broader questions about agency and intention. Vareschi argues that textual intentionality is a property of nonhuman, material media rather than human subjects alone, allowing the anonymous literature of the eighteenth century to speak to contemporary questions of meaning in the philosophy of language. Vareschi closes by exploring dubious claims about the death of anonymity and the reexplosion of anonymity with the coming of the digital. Ultimately, Everywhere and Nowhere reveals the long history of print anonymity so central to the risks and benefits of the digital culture.