"A ... memoir-in-essays that tackles the big questions of life, death, and existential fear with humor and hope"--

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A charmingly relatable and wise memoir-in-essays by acclaimed writer and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott, “the modern day reincarnation of…Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin—all rolled into one” (The Washington Post), about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on a successful life’s to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list—and herself. Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy. But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right” but still felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options? Taking on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood, Philpott provides a “frank and funny look at what happens when, in the midst of a tidy life, there occur impossible-to-ignore tugs toward creativity, meaning, and the possibility of something more” (Southern Living). She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife and reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary. Most of all, in this “warm embrace of a life lived imperfectly” (Esquire), Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down. You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong. Who among us isn’t trying to do that? “Be forewarned that you’ll laugh out loud and cry, probably in the same essay. Philpott has a wonderful way of finding humor, even in darker moments. This is a book you’ll want to buy for yourself and every other woman you know” (Real Simple).

Why some Americans built fallout shelters—an exploration America's Cold War experience For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy—"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time—forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being. Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war? Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail—including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon—One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.

From the author of Living on the Edge and Barbed Wire, Barricades, and Bunkers comes another information-packed guidebook for today's survivalists, Emergency Air: For Shelter-in-Place Preppers and Home-Built Bunkers. This new book offers a breath of fresh air on a subject about which very little information is available. It won't matter how well you plan or how much food, water, and other supplies you have stored and waiting for your neighborhood to become a nuclear fallout zone. Without breathable air, you will die! Leaving it for others to compile the lists of bullets, beans, and Band-Aids in their disaster-relief books, F.J. Bohan details how to safely ventilate an underground bunker or shelter-in-place room, sealed with duct tape and plastic sheeting, so you can escape the airborne particulate threats of anthrax, nuclear fallout, dirty bombs, biological and pandemic agents, or other airborne threats. This book educates you about all the variables involved in providing fresh air to your shelter before the need arises, including passive and active ventilation, air pumps, plumbing the bunker, air filters, and gas masks. After studying Emergency Air, you can breathe easier knowing you have done all you can to ensure your family's emergency air supply during a chemical, biological, ¬radiological, or nuclear emergency.

“Combines terrific suspense with thoughtful depth. . . . Riveting.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) In the summer of 1962, the possibility of nuclear war is all anyone talks about. But Scott’s dad is the only one in the neighborhood who actually builds a bomb shelter. When the unthinkable happens, neighbors force their way into the shelter before Scott’s dad can shut the door. With not enough room, not enough food, and not enough air, life inside the shelter is filthy, physically draining, and emotionally fraught. But even worse is the question of what will — and won’t — remain when the door is opened again.

Tracing the partnership between architects and American civil defense officials during the Cold War.

The Bomb Shelter Builders Book expands on two classic Civil Defense backyard shelter plans explaining how to build your own 100 sq ft concrete (or concrete block) underground bunker. Can be used for subterranean storage or emergency shelter. 8-1/2 x 11 inch paperback book includes full plan sheets.

S.A. Bodeen's The Compound is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year. Eli and his family have lived in the Compound for six years. The world they knew is gone. Eli's father built the Compound to keep them safe. Now, they can't get out. He won't let them.

Since prehistory, bunkers have been built as protection from cataclysmic social and environmental forces, and as places of power and transformation. Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears- from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn't take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere. In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now, an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus. The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us, in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it's in our minds.

A rare historical treasure that tells the riveting story of a Dutch family's survival in World War II. Melanie Wiggins, author of Torpedoes in the Gulf, Fatal Ascent, U-Boat Adventures, and They Made Their Own Law In May 1940, fourteen-year-old Johanna de Wilde was just like any other teenage girl in Nijmegen, Holland, who loved boys and music, but when Hitler and his German troops invaded her town during World War II, her life was changed forever. As bombs exploded around her house, Johanna was encouraged by her father to document their large family's struggles to survive as they desperately searched for food; fearfully hid Jewish friends; and bravely endured SS brutality, Gestapo searches, and resistance activities. Johanna shares how she was forced to write secretly and keep the pages of her diary well-hidden to avoid discovery by the Gestapo who would have surely shot her father and sent the rest of the family to concentration camps as punishment. As her town became the focal point of the huge Allied invasion, Operation Market Garden, Johanna provides an in-depth glimpse into how teenagers behaved during a traumatic time in history as they searched for excitement, danced and romanced, and played tricks on the enemy in order to offset hunger, earsplitting noise, and privation that persisted for five long years. Please read and see more at: www.dancinginbombshelters.com