A fascinating look at compulsive hoarding by a woman whose mother suffers from the disease. To be the child of a compulsive hoarder is to live in a permanent state of unease. Because if my mother is one of those crazy junk-house people, then what does that make me? When her divorced mother was diagnosed with cancer, New York City writer Jessie Sholl returned to her hometown of Minneapolis to help her prepare for her upcoming surgery and get her affairs in order. While a daunting task for any adult dealing with an aging parent, it’s compounded for Sholl by one lifelong, complex, and confounding truth: her mother is a compulsive hoarder. Dirty Secret is a daughter’s powerful memoir of confronting her mother’s disorder, of searching for the normalcy that was never hers as a child, and, finally, cleaning out the clutter of her mother’s home in the hopes of salvaging the true heart of their relationship—before it’s too late. Growing up, young Jessie knew her mother wasn’t like other mothers: chronically disorganized, she might forgo picking Jessie up from kindergarten to spend the afternoon thrift store shopping. Now, tracing the downward spiral in her mother’s hoarding behavior to the death of a long-time boyfriend, she bravely wades into a pathological sea of stuff: broken appliances, moldy cowboy boots, twenty identical pairs of graying bargain-bin sneakers, abandoned arts and crafts, newspapers, magazines, a dresser drawer crammed with discarded eyeglasses, shovelfuls of junk mail . . . the things that become a hoarder’s “treasures.” With candor, wit, and not a drop of sentimentality, Jessie Sholl explores the many personal and psychological ramifications of hoarding while telling an unforgettable mother-daughter tale.

I've had my share of puck bunnies, but this one was different. Allie. The girl with the sexy, shy smile and the sweetest, wettest mouth I ever tasted. She blew my mind and then slid out of my bed without giving me her number. I knew I should forget the woman who ghosted me, yet for months, I searched the crowds, the streets...everywhere looking for her face. Then, I got traded. This new team hates me. Something about my chronic case of resting prick face and that fight with the captain when the season started. My left hook, his jaw. Yeah, we go back and not in a good way. Coach says no more "confrontational BS" or I won't play. That's a hit my NHL career can't take. So the plan is simple. Keep my head down and my fists checked. There's just one problem. I found Allie. She's the captain's little sister and even though my career depends on keeping the peace between myself and my teammates... I can't stay away from the one woman I can't have. As it turns out, neither can she. **All books in this series are interconnected but can be read as standalones

The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.

Everyone has a secret. But Lucy's is bigger and dirtier than most. It's one she's been hiding for years-that her mom's out-of-control hoarding has turned their lives into a world of garbage and shame. She's managed to keep her home life hidden from her best friend and her crush, knowing they'd be disgusted by the truth. So, when her mom dies suddenly in their home, Lucy hesitates to call 911 because revealing their way of life would make her future unbearable-and she begins her two-day plan to set her life right. With details that are as fascinating as they are disturbing, C. J. Omololu weaves an hour-by-hour account of Lucy's desperate attempt at normalcy. Her fear and isolation are palpable as readers are pulled down a path from which there is no return, and the impact of hoarding on one teen's life will have readers completely hooked.

Set in the upscale DC private school scene, where silence can easily be bought, Aggie Blum Thompson's All the Dirty Secrets asks how far you would go to protect your status and your family, and if some secrets should ever be revealed. One warm summer night twenty-five years ago, Liza Gold and her friends celebrated their high school graduation with a party on the beach. It should have been the best night of their lives, only one of them never came back out of the ocean. The tragedy haunted Liza Gold for years. Now, she's a recently divorced working mom struggling to connect with her standoffish teenager daughter Zoe when history repeats itself. Another young woman has drowned at Beach Week, and this time the victim is Zoe’s secret best friend. Liza begins to suspect that the two deaths are somehow related, which causes her to face hard truths and take an unflinching look at the people she’s called her closest friends for the past two decades. She must discover what really happened to both women before it’s too late. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic was valued at over £1.2 billion when he sold a 49% stake to Singapore Airlines in 1999. This was an extraordinary achievement for an airline that began life in 1984 with one plane. Virgin Atlantic became one of the world's top airlines only after surviving an incredible dirty tricks campaign by British Airways. Award Winning investigative jounalist Martyn Gregory exposed BA's secret war, and he reveals the full story in Dirty Tricks.

Charmaine Wilson seems to have it all together: a good job, good friends, and an active social life. But for all the good in her life, she can’t seem to get her relationship status in order. Finding the right man is impossible in her world. With late night parties, people to see, and a penchant for men with money, how is Charmaine ever going to find the man of her dreams? Jayla loves her friend, but she knows Charmaine’s partying ways aren’t doing her any favors. When she tries to convince her to think about settling down and getting herself right for a relationship, Charmaine runs into a whole new set of problems! Find out what happens in part one of His Dirty Secrets: Charmaine’s story!