Ben Cohen’s dad didn’t know anything about the sport his young son had taken up, but he was happy to drive him to practice, and was soon helping out at the club. When his business went bankrupt money was tight, but Ben’s hard working parents inspired their son to put his all into rugby. Then, when Ben was 20, his father intervened in a fight in the nightclub where he worked. He was viciously beaten and one month later he died in hospital. Ben was doing an England press conference at the time, and it was down to coach Clive Woodward to deliver the devastating news. But the ordeal was far from over. The inquest lasted five months before the funeral could be held, and it was a year before the family were in court, facing Peter’s assailants. Ben put all of the anger and pain from his father’s death into his rugby. Fast and powerful on the wing, he was soon the best in the world in his position and a cornerstone of the England team, culminating in the legendary World Cup win in Sydney in 2003. And yet he always felt like an outsider. Most people didn’t know that Ben is clinically deaf. His sixth sense for the game got him through on the pitch, but off it his poor hearing was often taken for arrogance. This is an inspirational story of passion and pain; of the highs of achieving your goals, and the grief of losing something you can never get back.

"There are books that need to be written in order to explain important moments in our history. ‘Carry Me Home’ is one of those books" ~ Stacey | Absorbed in a Book "Jessica Scott should be on every reader's list." ~ Brenda Novak New York Times Bestselling Author Claire Montoya has never met a rule that wasn’t meant to be broken. Being in a woman in the Army means she has to be tougher and smarter than everyone around her. She good at being a soldier but ignores the quiet longing for something more - belonging. Evan is a man full of dark secrets and a thousand regrets. He finds solace in the rules and someone like Claire who doesn’t know how to spell the word grates on his last nerve. He must have been out of his mind the night he thought he was attracted to her. They’ve both avoided mention of that night but now, thrown together to help prepare a close friend for her upcoming deployment, they’re forced to confront their shared past. And together, they face a choice and a chance and finding a place they’ve both been longing for…a place called home. **Previously published as UNTIL THERE WAS YOU** ★★★★PRAISE FOR Jessica Scott★★★★ "A gripping and emotionally charged story with strong characters and incredible imagery. Scott's background gives her military romances a depth of truth and dose of reality that no others have." ~ Gina Maxwell | New York Times Bestselling author of Seducing Cinderella

Twelve-year-old Lulu, burdened with caring for her sister, Serena, since their father disappeared, must learn to trust her new friends and community when secrets and lies catch up with her.

Now with a new afterword, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic account of the civil rights era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation. "The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America’s second emancipation. In a new afterword—reporting last encounters with hero Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and describing the current drastic anti-immigration laws in Alabama—the author demonstrates that Alabama remains a civil rights crucible.

While in her early teens, L. Van Stelle lived in a farm house in the Kalamazoo Michigan area with her family. Some forty years later, during a stay with family, still in the area, she visited the farm to recollect some good memories during that time in her life. The family living there at that time, told her they had discovered a hidden room in the basement which historically, turned out to be a Safe-House, or hiding place for slaves. Fleeing from their owners, via the Underground Railroad. L. Van Stelle looked into this bit of information and wrote this tale of the plight, fright, and flight of six slaves trying to escape their masters from the south. The author now lives in Nevada and still thinks often of her happy teenage years in a home that none of her family, at the time, realized what a part of history, was living there with them.

The love of family. The heartbreak of war. The triumph of coming home. 1940. Rural Wisconsin. Sixteen-year-old Earl “Earwig” Gunderman is not like other boys his age. Fiercely protected by his older brother, Earwig sees his town and the world around him through the prism of his own unique understanding. He sees his mother’s sadness and his father’s growing solitude. He sees his brother, Jimmy, falling in love with the most beautiful girl in town. And while Earwig is unable to make change for customers at his family’s store, he is singularly well suited to understand what other people in his town cannot: that life as they know it is about to change; the coming war will touch them all. For Jimmy will enlist in the military. And Earwig will watch his parents’ marriage buckle under the strain of a family secret. And when Jimmy returns–a fractured shadow of his former self–it is Earwig’s turn to care for him. His struggles to right the wrongs visited upon his revered older brother by war, women, and life are at once heartwarming and riotously funny. Their family and town irrevocably altered, Earwig and Jimmy fight to find their own places in a world changed forever.

The collection of short essays in Carry Me Home begins as a lament for what in September 2005 looked to be the lost city of New Orleans. Over the following two-and-one-half years, these brief essays become a lyrical celebration of the city and the people, and a journal of a 20-year expatriate's decision to move home after the flood. Mark Folse is a former journalist who, after a twenty-year remove first to Washington, D.C. and later to the upper Midwest, returned with his family to the city of his birth. He currently resides in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans with his wife Rebecca, and their two children Killian and Matthew. He continues to chronicle his life in the city of New Orleans at his weblog Toulouse Street -- Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (www.toulousestreet.net)