Girl Walking Backwards

In Girl Walking Backwards, Skye wants what all teenagers want--to survive high school. She lives in Southern California, though, which is making that difficult. Her mother has fallen victim to the pseudo-New Age culture and insists on dragging her to consciousness-raising workshops and hypnotists. As if this weren't difficult enough, Skye falls in love with Jessica, a troubled gothic punk girl who cuts herself regularly with sharp objects. When she finds her boyfriend having sex with Jessica in a bathroom stall at a rave, her romantic illusions collapse and she has to face the fact that she's been running away from her mother's insanity. Right when things look their worst though, Skye is helped by Mol, a pagan who becomes her true friend, and Lorri, a graceful volleyball player with whom she finds real love. From them she learns how to feel authentic emotions in a culture of poseurs and New Age charlatans. In this anti-coming-of-age novel by Bett Williams, where growing up is irrelevant, this is the best gift of all.

When Josh's mother dies in a phobia-induced car crash, she leaves two questions for her grieving family: how did a snake get into her car and how do you mourn with no faith to guide you? Twelve-year-old Josh is left alone to find the answers. His father is building a time machine. His four-year-old brother's closest friend is a plastic Power Ranger. His psychiatrist offers nothing more than a blank journal and platitudes. Isolated by grief in a home where every day is pajama day, Josh makes death his research project. He tests the mourning practices of religions he doesn't believe in. He tries to mend his little brother's shattered heart. He observes, records and waits—for his life to feel normal, for his mother's death to make sense, for his father to come out of the basement. His observations, recorded in a series of journal entries, are funny, smart, insightful—and heartbreaking. His conclusions about the nature of love, loss, grief and the space-time continuum are nothing less than life-changing.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery, the story of a Texas man who, during the Great Depression, walked around the world -- backwards. Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary -- something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he'd lost. He decided to walk around the world -- backwards. In The Man Who Walked Backward, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery charts Plennie's backwards trek across the America that gave rise to Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and the New Deal. With the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a backdrop, Montgomery follows Plennie across the Atlantic through Germany, Turkey, and beyond, and details the daring physical feats, grueling hardships, comical misadventures, and hostile foreign police he encountered along the way. A remarkable and quirky slice of Americana, The Man Who Walked Backward paints a rich and vibrant portrait of a jaw-dropping period of history.

From Istanbul to New Delhi to Boulder, Colorado, through Venice, Paris, Rome, and points between. As travellers, we are always walking backwards, forever on the verge of stepping into the unknown, never knowing what waits around the next corner. You could be lost, forget your passport, fall ill. You could be served a bowl of food and not know whether it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral. Even flushing the toilet can be an adventure. You are a child again, innocent and hoping for the best, forced to trust strangers. Quite often this works out. Not always. Walking Backwards is a return to 10 cities and what happened there. Whether inadvertently smuggling cloth into Istanbul, reading poetry in New Delhi to a crowd expecting a world-famous pianist, or wandering endlessly through Mantua searching for a non-existent hotel on a street that’s fallen off the map, Mark Frutkin is a master at rediscovering the magic at the heart of all travel.

"Did Ernie Wise really make the first mobile phone call in the UK? Did Isaac Newton invent the cat flap? Is a smurf really three apples tall? Pub facts are the improbable, bizarre and yet somehow convincing claims that are often wheeled out by armchair scientists, amateur lawyers and pub historians. They ll tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that you can get tonsillitis even if you ve had your tonsils removed; that it s illegal to drive in bare feet; and that Attila the Hun died from a nosebleed. But is it fact or fabrication? mus Can t Walk Backwards will help you stride confidently through the most treacherous trivia minefield, while providing definitive answers to life s most pressing concerns. Did Johnny Cash become addicted to painkillers after being attacked by an ostrich? Do ants ever sleep? Are mushrooms and toadstools the same thing? efreshingly cynical and engagingly informative, this hilarious follow-up to Bears Can t Run Downhill clears up the confusion by revealing the outright lies, the muddled misunderstandings and just occasionally the astonishing truth."

Funny, charming, and true to the life of toddlers, Ella May is a strong-willed female character who will captivate children and parents.

A ground-breaking guide to understanding how aging happens in our cells and how to maintain and repair those cells--and roll back joint pain and muscle loss at any age--through gentle, scientifically designed workouts based on Classical Stretch and Essentrics, developed by the author and star of PBS's Classical Stretch series. It's never too late to slow down, or even reverse, the effects of aging. The human body is designed to function for the full length of its life--and with gentle, full-body flexibility and strengthening exercises we can look and feel tremendous, vibrant and active at any age, and well into our senior years. After all, the body is the world's most efficient self-healing machine. And yet, remarkably, many of us neglect the single most important system in the body--the one that makes all the others work--the muscular system. The typical message we get as we age is that we can move less and should take it easy--exactly the wrong advice. Surprisingly, fitness enthusiasts often do as much harm to their bodies as people living sedentary lives. For example, yoga instructors get tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome from daily stress on wrists and elbows; Pilates instructors suffer pectoral and tricep muscle atrophy and even professional athletes grow overweight and suffer countless ACL, meniscus and disc injuries. Ligaments are virtually ignored by most exercises routines and yet joint health is essential in order to remain active. But these afflictions don't happen overnight, and with Aging Backwards we can slow or prevent their onset, and often reverse their symptoms.