The Longest Mile

Winner of the Gold Medal in the 2016 Living Now Book Awards In the course of their lifetime, one out of two men and one out of three women will be diagnosed with cancer. Many of us watch in desperation as our friends and loved ones fight for their lives. But after seeing several of her patients and her dearest aunt engage in a battle with cancer, Dr. Christine Meyer decided to embark on a quest for hope—and through happenstance and love, a team of runners emerged that empowered a community to make a difference, not only in the lives of cancer patients, but in one another’s lives. Along the way, Meyer learned that the true measure of a doctor’s success is not the number of lives saved but the number of lives touched.

For nine days in early May, Ryan Watkins along with two brothers, Jeremy and Chris Jones, backpack the world-famous Appalachian Trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From his very first steps into the Smokies, Ryan quickly learns the seventy-mile stretch of trail is far more difficult than he ever imagined. The trio battles through torrential rains, lightning, snow, fatigue, multiple encounters with bears and a standoff with a timber rattlesnake as they march more than eighty miles from Standing Bear Farms, a small hostel north of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, to Fontana Dam on the park’s southern tip. Along the way, the group meets a colorful cast of hikers while experiencing the most physically demanding and personally rewarding nine days of their lives. This story is a painfully honest, unadulterated and sometimes raunchy retelling of a hike that is definitely not suitable for readers of all ages.

The Longest Mile... is about finding Hope when we see no Hope. Having lived through the many years of abuse and mental illness can seem like too huge of a demon to confront, and yet, with God's help, demons can be conquered. We can come from the depths of pain and despair to climb to new heights and finding God's ultimate plan for each of our lives.

This book offers a compelling account of the two-pronged fight against both leprosy and the discrimination that comes with it. Leprosy is generally weak against the immune system, yet it persists in populations with inadequate nutrition and weak resistance, due to poverty or lack of disease control measures. Thus the battle against leprosy has involved a highly effective multidrug therapy, and getting it to communities in need. 'The Last and Longest Mile' tells the story of the WHO's offering of this cure, free of charge across the world, in 1995-9, through vital funding from the Nippon Foundation; and of how the Foundation has continued pursuing elimination of leprosy in the years since. Yohei Sasakawa, the organisation's chairman, has personally travelled the world to lead the struggle against the disease, and particularly to combat discrimination against leprosy patients or ex-patients and their families--an effort that has lagged behind the campaign to eradicate the disease itself. Award-winning writer Fumihiko Takayama accompanied Sasakawa on his seven-year global crusade from 2009. Here he recounts the milestones of their journey, explores the important advances and setbacks experienced along the way, and reveals the personal sense of mission that drives the tireless Yohei Sasakawa.

The author reports her experiences living with the people of the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, who are locked in a cycle of poverty which dooms each generation.

For his eighth birthday, Emilio Scotto received a World Atlas. Promptly he announced his plan to make a route that would pass through all the countries of the world, a route he named BLUE ROAD ONE. When, some years later, he found himself astride a black 1100 Honda Gold Wing motorcycle, Blue Road One beckoned, and Scotto set off on a journey that would last more than a decade, take him virtually everywhere in the world, and land him in the Guinness Book of World Records. This is his story, a thrill ride that begins in his native Argentina, crosses Panama in the tumultuous time of Noriega, Mexico in the midst of an earthquake, and finds him broke in L.A. where, in a chance meeting, Muhammad Ali gives him fifty dollars and a signed book. Breaching the Iron Curtain, crossing the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie, being blessed by the Pope, set upon by cannibals in Sierra Leone, fleeing Somalia on a freighter, Scotto's adventures would be unbelievable if they weren't true. His tale of touring the world from Tunisia to Turkey, Petra to Afghanistan, Yugoslavia to Singapore, traveling miles enough to take him to the moon and back, is unlike any ever told. Come along, for the ride of a lifetime.