In September of 1964, as my family’s green Chevy pulled away from campus, I choked up. I wondered what the heck am I doing? I know NOBODY here, and I am seven hundred miles from home. I had been a popular and capable student-athlete during high school. However, as a naïve eighteen-year-old, I wasn’t ready for my new situation. To varying degrees, the young men in my dormitory who became my best friends were unprepared as well. Though we were from different states (more like different world...

CRASH COURSE is the story of three disaffected twenty-somethings and determined terrorist wannabes from Des Moines who intend to carry out a large-scale attack on San Francisco. They know the best day and the most effective method to create massive casualties and a long-term ecological disaster. Only Colin Hennessy, a downtrodden vagabond writer and a small flotilla of aging Coast Guard volunteers led by Jackson Boyd are positioned to thwart the Iowans’ plans. But the odds greatly favor th...

You are flying cross-country in a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. I’ll bet you an overpriced on-board sandwich that three-quarters of your fellow passengers can’t explain how that half-million-pound machine stays aloft. “It is something about lift, and curved wings,” they will say. Really? If the wing’s upper curvature matters, how can planes fly upside down? Most will add, “I don’t know, and I try not to think about it.” I sympathize. I am approaching three million miles on just one airline, and I...

I don't know why I was chosen for this, or even how it happened.After many years of meditation and development, one night my Guide told me to "let go and we'll do the rest."This book is all about what heppened next.

The day began as most of the other days had begun. Beths husband snuggled close. He smelled of after-shave and toast. He kissed her and their baby boy good-bye as he headed out the door for the train station and work in New York City. Etiennes fiance kissed him good-bye, too, told him the coffee was started and that she just had to run downtown and would be back in an hour or two. And then, two airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center Towers and killed almost three thousand people. An...

During four summers while in my early teens, I spent time at my Uncle Rod’s farm. My dad drove our trusty Studebaker the 330 miles from Omaha to his brother’s place in southwest Minnesota. We all spent a couple days at the farm, and then the rest of my family—mom, dad, sisters Sandy and Sunny-- returned to our Nebraska home. I was left for a month in the capable, calloused hands of our rural relatives. The episodes that follow are a mix of everyday farm activities and some ways we found to...

There comes a time in each mans life when he will stand before another, and give an accounting. It is a moment of inventory, reconciliation and reflection, an opportunity to acknowledge, and perhaps a time to ask for forgiveness. That time has come for Monroe. His hard life stares back at him in an unflinching mirror of pain, despair, success, failure, and fl ashes of unbridled joy. He confesses with candid detail a journey of confusion, fear, and unanticipated courage. from the counter-cu...

Leo often felt that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On June 4, 1994, he was in a white Ford Bronco on Highway 405 outside of Los Angeles. Every law enforcement officer within one hundred miles was looking for a white Bronco and a fugitive named O. J. Simpson. And so Leo did what any Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder would do: he ditched the beer, threw the joint out the window, and panicked. He steered off the freeway and into the unsuspecting life ...

Exploring how Ulysses imitates the human mind at work, connecting close readings to psychological theories of Joyce’s timeIn this book, John Gordon uses historically oriented close readings to demonstrate that Ulysses is a book that mimics the workings of the human mind. Gordon highlights James Joyce’s exceptional ability to capture and represent lived experiences, showing how Joyce’s writings display the ways specific minds interact with their en...

This book is an indispensable guide for anyone training to become a secondary English teacher. It provides an overview of the main topics taught in schools, informed by good teaching practice drawn from the classroom and supported by research and theory, and engages with the requirements of the 2014 National Curriculum for England.Each chapter is based around a ‘lesson feedback’ case study informed by real classroom observations combined with research findings to explore and analys...

This book is for any adult who reads to a child below reading age, when both have tired of traditional nursery rhymes. The words and pictures will stimulate discussion and conversations between adult and child. It is also the author’s hope that his appalling jokes will raise a smile from the adults.

Time marches on, bulldozing obstacles, ignoring impediments and complications. It takes time to realize that there is no time like the present and longer, perhaps, to realize that there is no better present than the gift of time.This is another volume of musings, thoughts, opinions, and silly comments accumulated over timetime appreciating life and loving the blessing of that appreciation.