"Having arrived at a certain age (her prime), Ann Leary casts a wry backward glance at a life spent trying--and often failing--to be nice. With wit and surprising candor, Leary recounts the bedlam of home bat invasions, an obsession with online personality tests, and the mortification of taking ballroom dance lessons with her actor husband. She describes hilarious red-carpet fiascos and other observations from the sidelines of fame, while also touching...

"Explorers Kristen and Ville Jokinen met scuba diving in Vietnam and fell in love. She was a real estate agent from Oregon, and he a financial analyst for Toyota in his native Finland. After hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from the border of Mexico to Canada they decided their next adventure would be a two-year cycling trip covering 18,000 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina, despite never having cycled other than around the block....

"Our society is obsessed with achievement. Young people are pushed toward the next test or the "best" grammar school, high school, or college they can get into. Adults push themselves toward the highest-paying, most prestigious jobs, seeking promotions and public recognition. As Adam Gopnik points out, the result is not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with no way out. Except one: to choose accomplishment over achievement. Achievement, Gopnik argues,...

"Travel through a garden's seasons toward healing, reclamation, and wholeness--for us, and for our beloved relative, the Earth. In this rich collection of prose, poetry, and recipes, Teresa Peterson shares how she found refuge from the struggle to reconcile her Christianity and Dakota spirituality, discovering solace and ceremony in communing with the earth. Perennial Ceremony brings us into this relationship, as Peterson guides us through the Dakota...