An intriguing true story of a young man learning to live with a serious disability, with his young wife aside. Take yourself along for a journey that could happen to anybody at any time. His triumph over tragedy attitude is the only thing that keeps them going. Read more about his life and his eternal source. It should leave you with a greater appreciation of life! Thanks for taking a look. Philip Almy

“Do you think you could teach Rock Hudson to talk like you do?” The question came from famed Hollywood director George Stevens, and an affirmative answer propelled Bob Hinkle into a fifty-year career in Hollywood as a speech coach, actor, producer, director, and friend to the stars. Along the way, Hinkle helped Rock Hudson, Dennis Hopper, Carroll Baker, and Mercedes McCambridge talk like Texans for the 1956 epic film Giant. He also helped create the character Jett Rink with James Dean, who became a best friend, and he consoled Elizabeth Taylor personally when Dean was killed in a tragic car accident before the film was released. A few years later, Paul Newman asked Hinkle to do for him what he’d done for James Dean. The result was Newman’s powerful portrayal of a Texas no-good in the Academy Award–winning film Hud (1963). Hinkle could—and did—stop by the LBJ Ranch to exchange pleasantries with the president of the United States. He did likewise with Elvis Presley at Graceland. Good friends with Robert Wagner, Hinkle even taught Wagner’s wife Natalie Wood how to throw a rope. He appeared in numerous television series, including Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Dragnet, and Walker, Texas Ranger. On a handshake, he worked as country music legend Marty Robbins’s manager, and he helped Evel Knievel rise to fame. From his birth in Brownfield, Texas, to a family so poor “they could only afford a tumbleweed as a pet,” Hinkle went on to gain acclaim in Hollywood. Through it all, he remained the salty, down-to-earth former rodeo cowboy from West Texas who could talk his way into—or out of—most any situation. More than forty photographs, including rare behind-the-scenes glimpses of the stars Hinkle met and befriended along the way, complement this rousing, never-dull memoir.

Reissued to coincide with the paperback publication of the definitive Bing biography by Gary Giddins, here is "a collection of anecdotes and reminiscences that is as warm and witty as any Crosby performance. [Bing] could have surely become a full-time writer had his schedule not been taken up with being one of the great entertainers of the century." -Will Friedwald

This book is a belated attempt by Jim Walters to explain just what happened to a life that early on seemed so full of promise. Any successes in life were always cancelled out by bad decisions on his part or just plain bad luck. The multiple instances of bad luck and the multiple bad decisions on his part seemed to produce a lifetime that seemed to have no direction at all. But an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder and subsequent depression, neither of which was discovered until midlife, adds some possible understanding as to just what went on.

A man saves the life of a woman who has no memory of her identity—and may be a dangerous criminal—in this steamy, mesmerizing tale of romantic suspense A volunteer with the Maui search and rescue team, Greg Braxton is training a greyhound under the extreme conditions of a lightning storm when he finds an unconscious woman in a car at the bottom of a cliff. When she awakens, she doesn’t know who she is or what she was doing in a treacherous rainforest in the middle of a raging storm. Nothing about the woman makes sense. She has the face of an angel but was found dressed in tawdry clothing, wearing a dead woman’s shoe. Is she an innocent victim, or a cunning criminal hiding behind amnesia? Greg takes to calling her “Lucky” because she’s lucky to be alive, but no matter how much Greg comes to admire and desire the woman he saved, he can’t give her back her past. With the law closing in, Lucky and Greg must discover her true identity before someone else—someone obsessed with her—finds her first.

He is Yo Himomura, deadly assassin for the 108 Dragons, the Chinese Mafia. But to the criminal underworld who fear him, he is known as Crying Freeman, the killer who sheds tears at the fate of his victims. A young, handsome, sensitive artist, Yo has been hypnotically programmed by his Dragon masters to kill on command: he cannot resists his masters' commands to kill; his masters cannot stop his tears of remorse. Written by the legendary Kazuo Koike, creator of Lone Wolf and Cub, and illustrated by the incomparable Ryoichi Ikegami, Crying Freeman is adult manga at its darkest.

A collection of hardboiled crime fiction from the author of Double Indemnity, “one of the greats of American noir” (The Guardian). They call him Lucky—but he’s never had a lucky day in his life. A nineteen-year-old hobo just starting to ride the rails, he is hiding in the coal car when the railroad detective comes through. They get into a scuffle, and Lucky’s hand finds a railroad spike. . . . “Dead Man” is just one of the outstanding stories in this collection by the author renowned for insightful and exciting crime stories. Hailed as a “poet of the tabloid murder” by legendary critic Edmund Wilson and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, James M. Cain, understood fear in all its forms—and knew better than anyone the terror of a killer on the run. This volume includes: “The Baby in the Icebox” • “Pay-Off Girl” • “Two o’Clock Blonde” • “The Birthday Party” * “Brush Fire” • “Coal Black” • “Career in C Major” • “Death on the Beach” • “Dead Man” • “The Girl in the Storm” • “Joy Ride to Glory” • “Pastorale” • “Mommy’s a Barfly” • “The Taking of Montfaucon” • “Cigarette Girl” • “The Robbery” • “Blackmail”

A ruthless Axis agent code-named Sirocco and an American linguist turned amateur spy find themselves on a collision course with destiny in romantic and exotic World War II Casablanca. Roosevelt and Churchill are coming to Casablanca. So are Eisenhower and Patton, Montgomery and DeGaulle. For ten days, the entire Allied High Command will be gathered in one place-to plan the invasion of Fortress Europe. Learning of the secret conference through an Abwehr intercept, Hitler launches an audacious counterstrike - with one demonic blow he will take out the assembled Allied chieftains and turn the tide of war back in favor of the Reich.

Ricky needs to unearth why his father committed suicide on Christmas Eve twenty years ago. He returns to New York as a Funeral Director to investigate rumors that his father's suicide was murder.

FROM THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF THE LAST PEARL AND THE CAPTAIN'S DAUGHTER, this is a beautiful and dramatic novel about family secrets, wartime betrayal and redemption. When Isobel Morton takes over the café in Lichfield’s market square, she has big plans. Soon renamed The Victory Café, with a menu that delights despite rations, the girls who work at the Vic are swept away by Belle’s lust for life. Among the regular customers is a trio of soldiers from the nearby American base and waitress Dorrie Goodman soon befriends them, learning about jazz and romance in the process. But the stifling morality of a Midlands town in the 40s cannot accommodate such a friendship; jealously, hatred and the weight of public disapproval combine to precipitate a tragedy. It is not until many years after the war that friendship and reconciliation can begin to heal the wounds of the past … Praise for Leah Fleming 'I enjoyed it enormously.It's a moving and compelling story about a lifetime's journey in search of the truth' RACHEL HORE 'A born storyteller' KATE ATKINSON