The author, flight director in NASA's Mission Control, tells of the challenges in space flight from the very early years to the current time and of "his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now."--Jacket.

“Writing this funny requires immense talent.” —AV Club H. Jon Benjamin—the lead voice behind Archer and Bob's Burgers—helps us all feel a little better about our own failures by sharing his own in a hilarious memoir-ish chronicle of failure. Most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin a comedy show business success. But he'd like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. And maybe the best option. In this book, he tells stories from his own life, from his early days ("wherein I'm unable to deliver a sizzling fajita") to his romantic life ("how I failed to quantify a threesome") to family ("wherein a trip to P.F. Chang's fractures a family") to career ("how I failed at launching a kid's show"). As Jon himself says, breaking down one's natural ability to succeed is not an easy task, but also not an insurmountable one. Society as we know it is, sadly, failure averse. But more acceptance of failure, as Jon sees it, will go a long way to making this world a different place . . . a kinder, gentler place, where gardens are overgrown and most people stay home with their pets. A vision of failure, but also a vision of freedom. With stories, examples of artistic and literary failure, and a powerful can't-do attitude, Failure Is an Option is the book the world doesn't need right now but will get regardless.

In the thirty years I spent in Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT), I participated in some of the most highly publicized events in law enforcement history, which generated national and even international attention, including the takedown of the DC snipers. I was also involved in a hostage rescue incident by a lone-wolf domestic terrorist who the FBI determined was "the first suicide bomber with hostages in the United States" at the Discovery Headquarters Building in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the capture of a violent group of serial bank robbers featured on John Walsh's America's Most Wanted. These events and the 4,500 raids and barricades I participated in over my career helped to prepare me for the life-threatening medical incidents that transpired beginning in 2010 and continue to today. At the height of my career as a SWAT commander, I was struck down by two diseases that at the time were deemed terminal with no available cure: multiple myeloma cancer and cardiac amyloidosis. Doctors told me I had less than two years to live-at best. I prepared for what would be the greatest fight of my life. A career in SWAT had trained me for this fight, with its quarterly fitness tests, numerous high-risk operations, and the mindset to persist against seemingly insurmountable odds. I overcame many obstacles, including "coding" in 2013 during a stem- cell transplant that required chest compressions and saline to bring me back to life and then a stroke precipitated in 2015 by the chemotherapy I was undergoing to forestall the myeloma and amyloidosis. I applied the same expectations that I had of the SWAT Team to myself, always telling the team, "Never complain, never quit, and the mission comes first. Failure's not an option as it relates to the mission." My mission is simple: survive. Eight years have passed since my initial diagnosis, and I am still alive and in remission, and by all medical accounts, I have defied the odds. This memoir consists of three elements: high-profile SWAT operations; my medical journey; and lessons on fitness, diet, and drug routines that have helped me manage these medical obstacles and improve my quality of life. My hope is that by sharing these incidents in SWAT and the medical odyssey that followed, I can help others manage their illnesses, improve their quality of life, and enjoy (directly or vicariously) the high-speed SWAT experiences and the medical risks that my medical team took for me.

Success is my only motherfucking option, failure's not: motivation Quote lined notebook/journal gift,120 pages, soft cover, matte finish

When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing. You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?

Combining nanotechnology, martial arts and a struggle for world domination, Dusk Before the Dawn follows people struggling to not only survive in a new world order, but to shape it.

Throughout history, arguments for and against the existence of God have been largely confined to philosophy and theology, while science has sat on the sidelines. Despite the fact that science has revolutionized every aspect of human life and greatly clarified our understanding of the world, somehow the notion has arisen that it has nothing to say about the possibility of a supreme being, which much of humanity worships as the source of all reality. This book contends that, if God exists, some evidence for this existence should be detectable by scientific means, especially considering the central role that God is alleged to play in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. Treating the traditional God concept, as conventionally presented in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, like any other scientific hypothesis, physicist Stenger examines all of the claims made for God's existence. He considers the latest Intelligent Design arguments as evidence of God's influence in biology. He looks at human behavior for evidence of immaterial souls and the possible effects of prayer. He discusses the findings of physics and astronomy in weighing the suggestions that the universe is the work of a creator and that humans are God's special creation. After evaluating all the scientific evidence, Stenger concludes that beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God. This paperback edition of the New York Times bestselling hardcover edition contains a new foreword by Christopher Hitchens and a postscript by the author in which he responds to reviewers' criticisms of the original edition.

The untold story of the historic voyage to the moon that closed out one of our darkest years with a nearly unimaginable triumph In August 1968, NASA made a bold decision: in just sixteen weeks, the United States would launch humankind’s first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken. But when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were summoned to a secret meeting and told of the dangerous mission, they instantly signed on. Written with all the color and verve of the best narrative non-fiction, Apollo 8 takes us from Mission Control to the astronaut’s homes, from the test labs to the launch pad. The race to prepare an untested rocket for an unprecedented journey paves the way for the hair-raising trip to the moon. Then, on Christmas Eve, a nation that has suffered a horrendous year of assassinations and war is heartened by an inspiring message from the trio of astronauts in lunar orbit. And when the mission is over—after the first view of the far side of the moon, the first earth-rise, and the first re-entry through the earth’s atmosphere following a flight to deep space—the impossible dream of walking on the moon suddenly seems within reach. The full story of Apollo 8 has never been told, and only Jeffrey Kluger—Jim Lovell’s co-author on their bestselling book about Apollo 13—can do it justice. Here is the tale of a mission that was both a calculated risk and a wild crapshoot, a stirring account of how three American heroes forever changed our view of the home planet.

Banishment from his life’s calling can’t keep a comically overconfident detective down in the latest episode by New York Times bestseller Stephan Pastis. This book was never meant to exist. No one needs to know the details. Just know this: there’s a Merry, a Larry, a missing tooth, and a teachers’ strike that is crippling Timmy Failure’s academic future. Worst of all, Timmy is banned from detective work. It’s a conspiracy of buffoons. He recorded everything in his private notebook, but then the manuscript was stolen. If this book gets out, he will be grounded for life. Or maybe longer. And will Timmy’s mom really marry Doorman Dave?

Argues that failures in structural engineering are not necessarily due to the physical design of the structures, but instead a misunderstanding of how cultural and socioeconomic constraints would affect the structures.