Twenty year-old Speedy Chase Rodgers seemed to have it all. His family loved him dearly. His generosity and sense of humor made him popular among his peers. His speed, agility, and competitive nature made him a force to be reckoned with on the football field. Young ladies were drawn to his good looks, quiet charm, and spontaneity. How will his family and friends cope when Chase makes choices that ultimately lead to his death in a tragic car wreck? A Life Half Lived gives the reader a glimpse inside the modern drug culture and the consequences that come with it.

Andrew MacLeod was a Senior Adviser on Disaster Response for the United Nations. In this book, he offers examples that include the people he met and the response success rates, problems with the execution and the success that made him decorated for his part. It focuses on his life in front line care services in the crisis points of the world.

“So this is my life? What happened to the person I thought I might be at this stage of the game? Where did that person go? Why am I feeling like I’m just treading water, trying to stay one step ahead of my bills and obligations. Anyway, I’m just too tired at this point to try to figure out where that other person went. But I sure expected to be living a different life than this one.” Most people in their forties, fifties, and beyond catch themselves saying something similar to this. Everyone has a mental image of the person they want to be, but few of us actually fulfill these wishes. Once people realize they are living a completely different life than they’d envisioned, they often think it is too late to change and carry on with the same old habits. Too many people settle for a half-lived life. Best-selling author John Lee has long been addressing the fallacy of this attitude in talks and workshops—and now he sets this program into book form. In The Half-Lived Life, he introduces and explains how passivity holds us hostage to old ways of doing things—and provides solutions on escaping this paralyzing state of mind, body, and spirit while increasing our emotional intelligence (EQ). He also shows the freedom to be gained via compassionate assertiveness—an outgrowth of setting boundaries and enforcing limits. Just as Lee’s seminars have successfully led many to find their authentic self in the second half of their life, so too will this book.

Heartbreak and grief touch every soul at least once in a lifetime and Ranata Suzuki translates those raw emotions into words. The Longest Night combines strikingly poignant quotations, powerfully emotive poetry and captivating silhouette imagery to form a mournful lover's journal that explores a side of love that is deep, dark and hauntingly beautiful. Each of the book's elements are skilfully woven together to reveal fragments of thoughts and feelings that seem almost to belong to the reader as years of painful longing are condensed into the context of a single night. The journal begins with 'Sunset', in which poems convey the initial feelings of shock and loss first felt when a relationship with a loved one ends. As the poetry descends into an emotional downward spiral, the book progresses into its next chapter, 'Darkness', in which emptiness, jealousy, sorrow and despair are passionately portrayed. The concluding chapter, 'First Light', sees the gradual dawning of a new outlook. The final poems express a gratitude for what once was, an acceptance of what now is, and come to the uplifting conclusion that even though a relationship can be fated to end tragically, the memories gained and lessons learned from it are, in their own way, treasured gifts that will last a lifetime. A book for anyone who has found themselves separated from someone they love no matter the circumstance, The Longest Night is a companion for the broken heart on the painful emotional journey that is losing someone you love from your life. Its words serve as a comforting reminder, whether you are travelling this road or have recently completed this journey yourself, that despite the loneliness you may sometimes feel along the way none of us walk this path alone.

In this powerful, unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Darin Strauss examines the far-reaching consequences of the tragic moment that has shadowed his whole life. In his last month of high school, he was behind the wheel of his dad's Oldsmobile, driving with friends, heading off to play mini-golf. Then: a classmate swerved in front of his car. The collision resulted in her death. With piercing insight and stark prose, Darin Strauss leads us on a deeply personal, immediate, and emotional journey—graduating high school, going away to college, starting his writing career, falling in love with his future wife, becoming a father. Along the way, he takes a hard look at loss and guilt, maturity and accountability, hope and, at last, acceptance. The result is a staggering, uplifting tour de force. Look for special features inside, including an interview with Colum McCann.

One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

Presents good value destinations to live in around the world and how to transition.