In his landmark book The Geography of Nowhere James Howard Kunstler visited the "tragic sprawlscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside" America had become and declared that the deteriorating environment was not merely a symptom of a troubled culture, but one of the primary causes of our discontent. In Home from Nowhere Kunstler not only shows that the original American Dream -- the desire for peaceful, pleasant places in which to work and live -- still has a strong hold on our imaginations, but also offers innovative, eminently practical ways to make that dream a reality. Citing examples from around the country, he calls for the restoration of traditional architecture, the introduction of enduring design principles in urban planning, and the development of public spaces that acknowledge our need to interact comfortable with one another.

An inspiring story of courage, adaptation and determinaton — a year in the life of 11 refugee students entering universities across Canada. "Most journalists have stories they never forget. This is mine." When Debi Goodwin travelled to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in 2007 to shoot a documentary on young Somali refugees soon coming to Canada, she did not anticipate the impact the journey would have on her. A year later, in August of 2008, she decided to embark upon a new journey, starting in the overcrowded refugee camps in Kenya, and ending in university campuses across Canada. For a year, she recorded the lives of eleven very lucky refugee students who had received coveted scholarships from Canadian universities, guaranteeing them both a spot in the student body and permanent residency in Canada. We meet them in the overcrowded confines of a Kenyan refugee camp and track them all the way through a year of dramatic and sometimes traumatic adjustments to new life in a foreign country called Canada. This is a snapshot of a refugee's first year in Canada, in particular a snapshot of young men and women lucky and smart enough to earn their passage from refugee camp to Canadian campus.

In the early hours of July 13, 1977, seven female characters - ranging from a nine-year-old girl and her Greek immigrant mother, to a young chef who is losing her vision, to a brown rat - share the same subway platform. They are unaware that the next 24 hours will see them struggling to find their way home, both literally and metaphorically, when a historic power outage hits the city. For the women of Come From Nowhere, this blackout is personal: it brings revelation, self-awareness and, for at least one of them, tragedy.

The Middle of Nowhere is about a troubled 15-year-old girl, Lexie Crockett, who enters a residential treatment program somewhere in the Western United States. Based on personal experiences, the novel tells of the sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious adventures of the thousands of girls who live away from home in residential facilities. As events unfold, Lexie finds a bond with the other girls and with Annie Salinas, a gifted counselor, who helps her get closer to her goal of going home. Parents of some of the girls visit the program, and struggle with finding the line that is always shifting between understanding the girls problems and holding them accountable for their actions. When a large company moves to buy the facility, the staff resistsand the girls find some ways of their own to challenge the new owners. Each of the girls brings her own background to this challengebroken homes, drug addiction, mental and emotional instability, along with ingenuity, resilience, and a fierce desire for independence. More than 14,000 girls live in such programs, and the book makes painfully clear how difficult their lives areand why some of them succeed.

What would it be like taking a few weeks break and planning an unplanned travel across length and breadth of the country and explore the vastness and diversity of India? Aditya Khanna is a confused jobless ex-investment banker with an IIT - IIM lineage who does the same - except that nothing goes as he had expected. There were different kinds of people, each having a different tale to tell. From encounters ranging from meeting a know-it-all sadhu in the Himalayas to getting kidnapped by naxals to meeting a girl on the run whose only aim in life was to die. There were experiences of varied hues and shades in this roller coaster of a journey - experiences that could have made the trip a memorable one; and the experiences that had the power to break and change a person and in the process probably discover oneself. Will he take it all in his stride and move ahead and laugh at it when he looks back? Or will it leave him broken and shattered? Or will he discover his non confused self? Or will he be left stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere? Or ...

Amina was found by Auntie Vickie in a cardboard box on her doorstep and has lived with her ever since. When she is bullied by Vickie's son she can't stand it any longer, so she runs away. She then makes friends with Paul, an older teenager. Paul tries to help her find out about her real mother and become reconciled with Auntie Vickie.

Scientific progress is usually seen as a precondition of modern utopias, but science and utopia are frequently at odds. Ranging from Galileo's observations with the telescope to current ideas of the post-human and the human-animal boundary, this study brings a fresh perspective to the paradoxes of utopian thinking since Plato.