A family's dinnertime is disrupted when a bird flies down the chimney, starting a wild chase across the newly cleaned carpet.

My life was meticulously planned and I refused to deviate from that path. While my peers were partying, I prepared for the future. Then a tragic event destroyed everything and I learned that while I was looking ahead, I forgot to live in the moment. Starting over seemed impossible until I met Cara McCarthy, who lived every day like it was her last. She opened my eyes to a world of chaos and disorder. I loved every minute of it. She was also dating Tristan Adams, one of the most gorgeous men I’d ever seen. The three of us became inseparable. Our parents were oblivious and soon lines became blurred, feelings began to grow, and someone’s heart was going to get broken. I hoped it wasn’t mine.

In this collection of short stories and novellas, Lee Mueller examines what it was like growing up in the 1970s through the character of Marvin Milstead. Marvin is an only child who lives in a large Midwestern city and also in his own head. He is left to his own devices and imagination to pass the time. The stories explore different points and events in Marvin’s life from the first day of kindergarten with Kitties In The Garden through the divorce of his parents and being raised by grandparents and a single mother. Slices of his life are carved out in stories For A Change, What’s In There, and Kitties In The Garden to name a few. Each tale is chocked full of humor and nostalgia set against the backdrop of the Nixon and Ford years.

Former Scout Richard Bennett chronicles the history and stories of BSA Troop 826, a ragtag collection of neighborhood boys from Irving, Texas, who quickly grew up in the North Texas area, and needed the direction provided by Scoutmaster Warren Street and other adult volunteers. Bumps, bruises, and life lessons were the order of the day in the North Texas troop. No cell phones, video games, air conditioning, or televisions allowed! Boy vs Nature, first-time experiences away from the familiarity of home, success stories as well as the not-so-successful; it's all here. See what can happen when young men are given an opportunity to advance in life on the practice field known as 'Scouting.'

When a cranky, video game-loving city kid named Beamer has to spend the summer on a farm with his country cousin Bash, he suspects it's gonna stink -- and not just because there's a pig involved.

THE GRIT AND GLORY OF RESTAURANT LIFE, AS TOLD BY A SURVIVOR OF KITCHENS ACROSS AMERICA Cooking Dirty is a rollicking account of life "on the line" in the restaurants, far from culinary school, cable TV, and the Michelin Guide—where most of us eat out most of the time. It takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place. From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way of life in which "your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire." The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which life's mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried—a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling. With this deeply affecting book, Sheehan (already acclaimed for his reviews) joins the first class of American food writers at a time when books about food have never been better or more popular.

Honor Bound is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley. In examining the lives of the prisoners in captivity, it presents a vivid, sensitive, sometimes excruciating, account of how men sought to cope with the physical and psychological torment of imprisonment under wretched and shameful conditions. It includes insightful analyses of the circumstances and conditions of captivity and its varying effects on the prisoners, the strategies and tactics of captors and captives, the differences between captivity in North and South Vietnam and between Laos and Vietnam, and analysis of the quality of the source materials for this and other works on the subject.