Tim is an aimless teenage boy caught between the trauma of his past and the emptiness of his future. But a chance meeting with Cara, a tough young outsider determined to outrun her own pain and loss, sparks a flicker of hope. Will they be able to transcend the crushing limits placed on them in late 1980s rural America?

Obesity is an epidemic in America and worldwide. This former IT industry veteran shares his cautionary tale (and success!) with his personal fight against obesity and smoking cigarettes. Including tips on living with Type II Diabetes, chronic pain, and a host of other things that he has learned in his 55 years on this planet so far, Pushing Double Nickels has something for everyone. Here are a few of the "50 Things" covered in this book: A simple long-term way to lose weight permanently. How to quit cigarettes forever on the first try. The advantages of being an optimist. Advice and tips on Public Speaking. Advice for Business Professionals. Why Mystery Shopping is no mystery. You can improve yourself at any age! Why you are connected with everyone on Earth. 80 total life lessons, interesting facts, and much food for thought. Includes hundreds of web links you can use for further information! Pushing Double Nickels is meant to educate, illuminate, and motivate you into doing something positive for yourself, a loved one, your community, and your planet. Positive change is something that everyone can do beginning at any age. All it takes is the desire to improve and the self-motivation to make the long-term lifestyle changes necessary to accomplish your goals. Short-term fixes such as surgery, diet plans or programs, diet pills or shakes, etc. will only work for a short time. More often than not if the weight returns because the person did not make the long-term, lifestyle changes required for lasting results. What is needed is a way to live that you can continue to do for decades and for the rest of your life. Diet control is the key factor. All the diet plans and exercise in the world can't undo taking in more calories than you burn off. Self-improvement is much more than just losing weight or quitting smoking, it includes moral and ethical improvement as well. But getting your health in order is the first step. If you are overweight or obese then you are also more than likely dealing with other "bad" numbers like high blood sugar (Diabetes or Prediabetes), high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and now face a much shorter life-span as a result. And quitting cigarettes can be done on the first try. So, it's time to take control. Time to finally do something to make sure that you're going to be around a while longer. In Pushing Double Nickels I share how this old IT guy and former couch potato who was clinically obese and had a 30+ year smoking habit, took control, quit on the first try, and walked off over 100 lbs. We are all in this together but, making positive changes to humanity require making those changes individually first.

This book sheds some light on the band's remarkable music and, on this particular album, the blending of several styles into something that will never be replicated.

Thirty-year-old Johnny Romano wants to be taken seriously, but the choices he makes-a one-man production of Waiting for Godot, a monumental sneeze in a cold syrup commercial, and a thirty-thousand-dollar gambling debt to Salvatore "Sally Toast" Tosterelli-have sabotaged his acting career. His bad decisions have, more importantly, put his four-and-a-half-year relationship with a woman he truly loves-soap opera star Laura Winters-on the edge of a cliff. Through a botched car theft, Johnny meets Virgil Shepherd, street person and sometime porter for a bar on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. Scribbling his poems on napkins from Dunkin Donuts, Virgil is convinced that he is the Roman poet who guided Dante through Hell. Johnny is convinced that he is crazy. But as their lives converge, Johnny begins to suspect that the mysterious Virgil may actually have an agenda of his own. Set ten days before Christmas in 1997, Two Nickels follows this very unlikely pair through Manhattan (and a few choice spots on Staten Island) as they head toward the answer to a question that Johnny has done his best to avoid: What does it take for us to forgive ourselves and begin to heal?

The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

The story of the Minutemen has been told before (Our Band Could Be Your Life, We Jam Econo), but this book focuses purely on their music - the punk ethic and the remarkable, enduring songs that comprise this, their greatest achievement. Including extensive interviews with Mike Watt and many others close to and inspired by the band, this is a great tribute to a classic piece of American underground music. Included are extensive interviews with Mike Watt, the band's bass player, as well as interviews with several artists, musicians, studio owners, and fanzine writers who have been devoted followers of the band for years.

Framed in the backdrop of a nationwide media frenzy and a public mad with the hope of finding the multi-million dollar coin, this is the story of America's most eccentric and famous collectors, persistent reporters searching for the truth, shameless profiteers, and agents of the Smithsonian Institute desperate to stay above the fray. Enterprising collectors spared no expense over the decades advertising to purchase a 1913 Liberty Head nickel, prompting generations of collectors to search cans of coins and old collections they inherited, all for the hope of finding the prized 1913 Liberty Head nickel. In the end, it was an anonymous heiress with an old envelope, upon which was written the word fake, that held the truth. With that envelope and the coin inside, six of the world's most respected coin experts sat in a small room under the vigilant watch of armed guards. Few expected what they found. And what they found rewrote numismatic history...

The definitive chronicle of underground music in the 1980s tells the stories of Black Flag, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, and other seminal bands whose DIY revolution changed American music forever. Our Band Could Be Your Life is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties -- when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives re-energized American rock with punk's do-it-yourself credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging, and immensely influential. This sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing, and faith is an indie rock classic in its own right. The bands profiled include: Sonic Youth Black Flag The Replacements Minutemen Husker Du Minor Threat Mission of Burma Butthole Surfers Big Black Fugazi Mudhoney Beat Happening Dinosaur Jr.

Paul Orfalea's entrepreneurial philosophy melds business, personal finances, lifelong learning, and the pursuit of happiness.