Walk To Beautiful

A New York Times bestseller! Imagine yourself a thirteen-year-old hundreds of miles away from home, in a strange city, and your mom leaves you at a bus station parking lot and drives off into the night with her lover. That’s the real-life story of country music star Jimmy Wayne. It’s a miracle that Jimmy survived being hungry and homeless, bouncing in and out of the foster care system, and sleeping in the streets. But he didn’t just overcome great adversity in his life; he now uses his country music platform to help children everywhere, especially teenagers in foster care who are about to age out of the system. Walk to Beautiful is the powerfully emotive account of Jimmy’s horrendous childhood and the love he received from Russell and Bea Costner, the elderly couple who gave him a stable home and provided the chance to complete his education. Jimmy says of Bea, “She changed every cell in my body.” This moving memoir chronicles: Jimmy’s life as a foster child and homeless teenager His adoption by Russell and Bea Costner, an elderly couple who gave him a stable home and provided the opportunities for him to thrive His surprising rise to fame in the music industry His tireless advocacy for children in the foster care system through his Meet Me Halfway awareness campaign, a 1,700 mile walk halfway across America from Nashville to Phoenix Join Jimmy on his walk to beautiful and see how one person really can make a difference.

The marines give structure and boundaries to Jack's wayward life. A serious injury, and the hydrocodone provided for pain, expose him to drug use again. The addiction hits hard. Kathy, two dogs, an eccentric street person, and a twelve-step group offer support. Will it be enough? Jack disappears and is implicated in a robbery. Has he relapsed?

Thrust into the unlikely role of professional "literary walking tour" guide, an expat writer provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of Paris in years. In this enchanting memoir, acclaimed author and long-time Paris resident John Baxter remembers his yearlong experience of giving "literary walking tours" through the city. Baxter sets off with unsuspecting tourists in tow on the trail of Paris's legendary artists and writers of the past. Along the way, he tells the history of Paris through a brilliant cast of characters: the favorite cafés of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce; Pablo Picasso's underground Montmartre haunts; the bustling boulevards of the late-nineteenth-century flâneurs; the secluded "Little Luxembourg" gardens beloved by Gertrude Stein; the alleys where revolutionaries plotted; and finally Baxter's own favorite walk near his home in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Gynaecologists Catherine and Reg Hamlin left Australia in 1959 on a short contract to establish a midwifery school in Ethiopia. Over 40 years later, Catherine is still there, running one of the most outstanding medical programmes in the world. The Hamlins dedicated their lives to women suffering the catastrophic effects of obstructed labour. The awful injuries that such labour produces are called fistulae, and until the Hamlins began their work in Ethiopia, fistula sufferers were neglected and forgotten - a vast group of women facing a lifetime of incapacity and degradation. Catherine and Reg, with their team of dedicated fistula surgeons, have successfully operated on over 25,000 women, and the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, the hospital they opened in 1974, has become a major teaching institution for gynaecologists from all over Ethiopia and the developing world. Since Reg's death, Catherine and her team have continued the work.

Landon Carter never thought he would fall for Jamie Sullivan, the shy daughter of the town's Baptist minister who showed him the joy and pain of living.

When the Sudanese civil war reaches his village in 1985, 11-year-old Salva becomes separated from his family and must walk with other Dinka tribe members through southern Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya in search of safe haven. Based on the life of Salva Dut, who, after emigrating to America in 1996, began a project to dig water wells in Sudan. By a Newbery Medal-winning author.

For Somerville this was a kind of pilgrimage, a journey unlike any he had undertaken in 20 years of travel-writing. It was an expedition where he traded the usual comforts and certainties for a real physical and mental challenge, with no mobile phone or other technological aids. The only plan for his journey was to begin in the East at Easter and finish at Whitsun in the extreme West, at the Monastery of the Golden Step, whose gold step, legend says, can only be seen by those who have purged themselves into purity. During his 300-mile walk, he tackled four mountain ranges, high slopes and the numerous gorges of the West. Speaking only basic Greek and trying to follow a poorly way-marked path, he had to rely on his own instincts when climbing mountain passes and crossing high plateaux, farming and shepherding country, where villages are scarce and each night's accommodation was uncertain. He saw a Crete few ever encounter.

"Learn about autumn leaves through a rhyming, activities, and tree trivia"--P. [4] of cover.