Dr. Norman Hall has lived a full lifeninety-four years and counting, and he looks back at navigating change, overcoming challenges, and bearing witness to history in this memoir. Along the way, he ponders his successes and failures, the whys and the why-nots, the might-have-beens, the near-misses, and the what-ifs. While he grew up as a Texas country boy with limited success in school, he graduated from college, served four years in the Army, and spent seventy years as a school administrator. He recalls adventures dating all the way back to the 1920s and 1930s when his boyhood ranch was one of only two in a three-mile area. His playmates were Mexican children, and as he played with them, he learned their language and many of their customs. The roads were mainly dirt, and the rural mail carrier was the chief source of news for most families. Life was made up of many carefree days enjoying the small-town atmosphere. Join the author as he relives bucolic tales of rural life, serving in the Army, starting a family, and educating children and young adults in Back Roads of My Memory.

Missouri Off the Beaten Path features the things travelers and locals want to see and experience––if only they knew about them. From the best in local dining to quirky cultural tidbits to hidden attractions, unique finds, and unusual locales, Missouri Off the Beaten Path takes the reader down the road less traveled and reveals a side of Missouri that other guidebooks just don't offer.

A vampire meets his match. A porcelain doll that's more than it seems. A dog claiming it's an ambassador for an alien race. These are the characters you meet detouring down the world's backroads or foraging in the alleyways of our lives. Backroads and Alleyways is a collection of stories about the people and things best left in the shadowy deadend alleys or in the forest at the side of the road.

A delicious slice of undead Americana. Funny, tragic, and nicely weird--it's Monty Python meets "Night of the Living Dead." Definitely take a bite out of this one!--Jonathan Maberry, "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Rot & Ruin" and "Patient Zero."

An eleven-year-old boy is plucked from boarding school in England and transported to the tropical paradise of Jamaica where he's free to study his one great love--butterflies. He discovers that Jamaica has a wealth of these wonderful insects and sets about making a collection of as many as he can find. Along the way, he has adventures with other creatures, from hummingbirds to vultures, from iguanas to black widow spiders. Through it all runs the promise of the legendary Homerus swallowtail, Jamaica's national butterfly. Other activities intrude, like school, boxing and swimming lessons, but he manages to inveigle his parents into taking him to strange and sometimes dangerous places, all in the name of butterfly collecting. He meets scientists and Rastafarians, teachers, small boys and the ordinary people living on the tropical isle, and even discovers butterflies that shouldn't exist in Jamaica. Author Max Overton was that young boy. He counted himself fortunate to have lived in Jamaica in an age very different from the present one. Max still has some of the butterflies he collected half a century or more ago, and each one releases a flood of memories whenever he opens the box and gazes at their tattered and fading wings. These memories have become stories--stories of the Adventures of a Small Game Hunter in Jamaica.

“With intriguing and clever writing,” L.A. Davenport encourages the reader to “think about who [Thomas] is and…who we are in society”. The BookLife Prize "The Nucleus of Reality is strange, existential, and curious. It might give you a lot to ponder about if you dig deep enough… [It] reminded me a tad of The Stranger by Albert Camus… [It's] a stream of consciousness first-person novel with the most unreliable narrator you’ve ever met." Rummy's Recs "A beautifully described story of a man trying to remember why he ended up losing everything but himself." Emily Quinn, A Quintillion Words "A clever interpretation of a man’s grief and depression." Melanie’s Reads "It’s not easy reading but it’s worth it. It’s one of the more realistic depictions of mental health that I have read recently." Books by Bindu The truth is all around you Thomas P– is exhausted. He's been travelling for work so much he barely knows where he is. And then, while waiting for a table at a restaurant, he sees someone from his past. Exactly as she was twenty years ago, when they first knew each other. Deeply shaken, he tries to carry on as if nothing happened. But when it happens again, in a different restaurant, in a different city, Thomas's world begins to unravel. Haunted by a magnificent black parrot and a past he wants to forget, he becomes paranoid, unsure whether he can trust himself and the world around him. After he sees another friend he thought he had forgotten, he realises he is lost and alone, and afraid of his own mind. Then an enigmatic woman tells him he is not seeing things but rather his memory has been mined to create life-like androids that are replacing the human race one by one. And then he is arrested. Will Thomas resist the mysterious woman and get his life back? Or will he join her cult and take up arms in the fight to save us all? The Nucleus of Reality, or the Recollections of Thomas P—, is the story of a man trying to remember why he ended up losing everything but himself.

Scattered across Missouri you will find one of the best collections of old grist mills, country stores that have hardly changed in half a century, rivers pouring right out of the ground from the states many springs, hundreds of miles of limestone caves, flaming autumn colors to rival those anywhere in America, and small towns such as Bethel with a fascinating history. In this book you will find strange stories of a hearse leading a wagon train, and you will learn how the French wine industry was saved from destruction by two imaginative Missourians.

This is a self help book on how to teach yourself to control and in fact stop "your " use of Tobacco in any form once and for all. The author is a 59-year-old male who smoked 1 pack of Cigarettes each day for 22 years. That's 7300 cigarettes per year or in his case it was 160,600 cigarettes for 22 years. That's enough to make anyone sick and certainly has. From the age of 16 to 38 he always knew that one day he would eventually want to stop smoking and find a way to regain control of his life with respects to his one pack a day habit. While driving a truck in the middle of his normal work day back in the summer of 1986, he experienced some sudden fluttering in his chest and dizziness. Because he felt instant fear and out of control over this unexplained feeling he quickly made an appointment to see a cardiologist for a complete physical. Upon completion of his physical with his Doctor he was told he was very fit and in fine shape for a young man at 36 but that by the time he was 45 he could experience some real problems as he already had a wheeze. Even though there is no history of heart problems in his family being of Italian decent, and longevity was well established with parents who lived to almost 90 and grand parents who made it to 95 and 100, his concerns grew. He felt threatened by the thought of heart trouble from smoking because he once witnessed two men die right before his eyes from heart attack, and both men happen to be heavy smokers. His fears began to take their toll rapidly with the doctor's simply advice to "QUIT SMOKING NOW."

In 1987, Paul Morris went to Angola as a reluctant conscript soldier, where he experienced the fear and filth of war. Twenty-five years later, in 2012, Paul returned to Angola, and embarked on a 1500-kilometre cycle trip, solo and unsupported, across the country. His purpose was to see Angola in peacetime, to replace the war map in his mind with a more contemporary peace map, to exorcise the ghosts of war once and for all. Shifting skilfully between present and past, Back to Angola chronicles Paul’s epic journey, from Cuito Cuanavale to the remnants of his unit’s base in northern Namibia, and vividly recreates his experiences as a young soldier caught up in a war in a foreign land. Along the way, the book provides thought-provoking reflections on childhood, masculinity, violence, trauma and friendship. Back to Angola is an honest, intelligent and deeply moving account of war and its effects on an individual mind, a generation of people, and the psyche and landscape of a country.