Life On The Line

An award-winning chef describes how he lost his sense of taste to cancer, a setback that prompted him to discover alternate cooking methods and create his celebrated progressive cuisine.

"Football gave Ryan O'Callaghan a scholarship to Cal and the chance to earn millions in the NFL, but it also afforded him something far more important: a place to hide. As a closeted gay man, his helmet and pads became tools of deception...O'Callaghan, who retired in 2011 after four seasons, eventually found the courage to live his truth in retirement. His memoir offers an unsparing look at the nexus of sexuality and football." --Sports Illustrated "O'Callaghan came out as gay in 2017 after retiring from the league in 2011. Fearing condemnation while hiding his sexual orientation during a football career that spanned six seasons, O'Callaghan said he had regular suicidal thoughts while growing addicted to painkillers and he had elaborately planned his own death for retirement. In My Life On the Line, co-authored by Outsports co-founder Cyd Zeigler, O'Callaghan...credits then-Kansas City Chiefs executive Scott Pioli and Dr. Susan Wilson for saving his life once he came out to them." --USA Today "In a new book due out in September, O'Callaghan discusses his life story, including the treatment he received from former teammates after coming out." --Boston Globe "Former Patriots lineman Ryan O'Callaghan spent his entire career hiding his sexuality from his teammates, his friends and his family. He is now sharing that battle in his new book, My Life On The Line." --CBS Boston (WBZ TV) "O'Callaghan believes the NFL is moving in the right direction with social issues, albeit slowly...O'Callaghan is part of that change. And that change saved his life." --Boston Globe, feature on Ryan O'Callaghan "As one of the few openly gay former U.S. players, O'Callaghan's goal became making it easier for future athletes to be open about their sexuality and gender identity well before they enter professional sports." --Reuters "O'Callaghan is one of only a few openly gay former NFL players...In his upcoming memoir, My Life on the Line: How the NFL Damn Near Killed Me and Ended Up Saving My Life, O'Callaghan candidly discusses his addictions, mental health and struggles with his sexuality." --Washington Blade Ryan O'Callaghan's plan was always to play football and then, when his career was over, kill himself. Growing up in a politically conservative corner of California, the not-so-subtle messages he heard as a young man from his family and from TV and film routinely equated being gay with disease and death. Letting people in on the darkest secret he kept buried inside was not an option: better death with a secret than life as a gay man. As a kid, Ryan never envisioned just how far his football career would take him. He was recruited by the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent five seasons, playing alongside his friend Aaron Rodgers. Then it was on to the NFL for stints with the almost-undefeated New England Patriots and the often-defeated Kansas City Chiefs. Bubbling under the surface of Ryan's entire NFL career was a collision course between his secret sexuality and his hidden drug use. When the league caught him smoking pot, he turned to NFL-sanctioned prescription painkillers that quickly sent his life into a tailspin. As injuries mounted and his daily intake of opioids reached a near-lethal level, he wrote his suicide note to his parents and plotted his death. Yet someone had been watching. A member of the Chiefs organization stepped in, recognizing the signs of drug addiction. Ryan reluctantly sought psychological help, and it was there that he revealed his lifelong secret for the very first time. Nearing the twilight of his career, Ryan faced the ultimate decision: end it all, or find out if his family and football friends could ever accept a gay man in their lives.

The gripping account of six young doctors enlisted to fight COVID-19, an engrossing, eye-opening book in the tradition of both Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial and Scott Turow's One L. In March 2020, soon-to-graduate medical students in New York City were nervously awaiting "match day" when they would learn where they would begin their residencies. Only a week later, these young physicians learned that they would be sent to the front lines of the desperate battle to save lives as the coronavirus plunged the city into crisis. Taking the Hippocratic Oath via Zoom, these new doctors were sent into iconic New York hospitals including Bellevue and Montefiore, the epicenters of the epicenter. In this powerful book, New York Times journalist Emma Goldberg offers an up-close portrait of six bright yet inexperienced health professionals, each of whom defies a stereotype about who gets to don a doctor's white coat. Goldberg illuminates how the pandemic redefines what it means for them to undergo this trial by fire as caregivers, colleagues, classmates, friends, romantic partners and concerned family members. Woven together from in-depth interviews with the doctors, their notes, and Goldberg's own extensive reporting, this page-turning narrative is an unforgettable depiction of a crisis unfolding in real time and a timeless and unique chronicle of the rite of passage of young doctors.

Have you ever felt lonely or disconnected from people and the world? Life on the Line seeks to help you realize that you share a connection to everyone and everything in the universe and that there is no reason to ever feel alone again. Life on the Line contains a varied selection of quotations from sages, scientists, scholars, spiritual leaders, and artists regarding the interconnectedness of all things. You will see that all philosophies and religions and even quantum physics recognizes the interconnectedness of all things. Dark matter, string theory, Eastern and Western religions, and the philosophies of the native peoples all speak to it. Marilyn’s photographs of clotheslines, taken from a wide variety of countries throughout the world, display this concept of interconnectedness. When you see a clothesline, there is an immediate connection, because all humans experience the activity of laundry. Although each clothesline is unique, like the fingerprints of the person who hung the clothes, the underlying activity of laundry is immediately understood. The photographs contained in this book help you visualize the interconnectedness by showing you that from the USA to Easter Island, the human condition connects us all to each other. Life on the Line will offer you an opportunity to reflect on the interconnectedness of all life during our experience of planet earth.

Pierre-Étienne Fortin led a life and plied a career at the heart of Canada's early history. He was an adventurer, an amateur scientist, an early (if ambiguous) conservationist and a Conservative politician from 1867 to 1888. He was a doctor on Grosse-Île amid the horrors of the 1847 typhus epidemic, led a mounted police troop during the infamous Montreal riots of 1849 and, as commander of the armed schooner La Canadienne, policed the Gulf of St. Lawrence from 1852 to 1867, when thousands of New Englanders and Nova Scotians swarmed over the fishing grounds. His official life as magistrate and mid-level bureaucrat often exemplified tensions of early nationhood: those between elites and colonists; and those arising from the nationalistic impulse to impose law and order on the wilderness. The interests, issues and sympathies at work on Fortin in the founding period remain compelling today: job creation versus environmental protection, free trade with the U.S., the exploitation of Canadian fisheries, relations with aboriginal peoples, and the political status of Quebec within confederation.

Don't talk to strangers! We've all been taught this as children. Ominous times lie ahead for Andrea Taylor, when she finds out the hard way what can happen when chatting online with strangers! Her husband, William, is an Attorney and doesn't care for her virtual buddies. Andrea is frustrated with his working all the time, and chooses to defiantly ignore William's advice about meeting her online acquaintances. William gets heated when a man, his wife has met online, calls to let him know he is on his way to meet with her. Discover what William, and Andrea's brother John, an FBI agent have to do in order to try and save her! Andrea finds herself within grasp of a serial killer she has been chatting with and wishes more than ever she would have taken her husband's advice!

"Engaging--. Terrific--. Takes us over the collar line with grace and authority."--The New York Times As a veteran reporter throughout the "downsizing" years of the auto industry in the United States and Canada, Queens-born Solange De Santis covered her fair share of auto plant closings, but almost always from the management's point of view. That is, until this mid-career, mid-thirties, Ivy League-educated journalist quit her job to become an assembly-line autoworker. She was hired at a doomed General Motors plant, and quickly learned about the bone-crushing realities and mitigated rewards of hard, physical work. In Life on the Line, De Santis offers a glimpse into a world that too many of us shy away from acknowledging, even as we accept the keys to our new cars. Completely candid, and as unexpectedly poignant as it is funny, Life on the Line will change the way you view blue-collar work and the cars on which we all depend.

When the author was a kid, a big white sleek ambulance squatted like a lion in the driveway next door, always ready to go, and sometimes it did, roaring down the street. Today he is a MICA Flight Paramedic with decades of varied experience in 'a life of extremes' in an Australian ambulance service. He does shifts at base on-call, and teaches another generation of paramedics now. Loves his job. A list of well-known events that includes Victoria's Black Saturday Fires and the 2005 Bali Bombing - he was trying to get married when that call came in - mark two dark extremes. Technical matters - trauma treatment decisions, and the limits of aviation, for example - are explained. And this book includes the little things like the time the supermarket aisle was alive with the sound of music from an ex-patient's kid's lips: 'Thanks for looking after Daddy.' Darren couldn't have put it better himself, and it made his heart sing. This book tells what is like to be Darren Hodge on the end of a line, what it is like to be a paramedic. Open, honest reports, warts and all, this memoir is an unflinching account of how it feels, say, to pluck people from imminent death. And there are some laughs on the way...