Don Feeney has seen it all. As a diplomat working for the United States, he served in embassies and consulates around the world. As an air force officer, he had some daring exploits of varying levels of sanity and sophistication. Hes lived, worked, and played in more than fifty countries on five continents. In his memoir Gathering No Moss, Feeney recalls his three-decade trip down the wild, weird, and surprising journeys of his life. A somewhat reluctant traveler, he conveys the heavy burden of loneliness on the road while driven by the search for meaning, spirituality, and love. His life has been one of thought-provoking questions, highly charged emotional situations, and brushes with both greatness and tragedy. Hes been an airman, an officer, an instructor, a commander, an administrator, a trainer, a consular officer, a manager, and a diplomat. Hes sold paintings on a street corner, washed dishes, worked in a paper mill, flipped hamburgers, painted houses, and tended bar. He smoked pot, drank too much, and fell in (and out) of love (including four marriages). He went AWOL, was shot at three times, survived a brain aneurysm, and beat colon cancer. His mantraThe more you know, the more you dont know sh*t or TMYKTMYDKSreminds us all that the human mind will never let you understand the human mind.

Gathering No Moss is the autobiography of a possibly autistic child, born in 1925, who, idiosyncratically educated, grew up to see out, as a member of the Colonial Service, the end of the British Empire in East Africa. In later service with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, he witnessed novice states exulting in new-found independence. His last appointment, as deputy director of the Centre for International Briefing, at Farnham Castle in Surrey, was in an organisation devoted to inculcating, in those going ‘abroad’, better understanding of cross-cultural relations. Post-retirement, he keeps an eye, Pooter-like, on our changing world.

Determined to see all forty-eight states, Oliver Janvier sets off to learn more about the world than can be found in books or taught at school. Along the way he drifts from job to job, moves in and out of relationships, and is also witness to the Larchmont disaster and to his own brothers history-making athletic career. Spanning five decades of American history, Gather No Moss is a classic story of American wanderlust, stubborn independence, and the insatiable quest for new adventure.

Take a college baseball coach and have chosen for you an assistant with no baseball experience. Now, combine them with a Japanese contingent of players who speak no English. Add beautiful Rhonda, a streetwise stickball player; some skydiving; a baseball schedule that includes an elementary school, a local prison; a cross-dressing athletic director; and a wise-cracking announcer, and watch them fumble their way through a baseball season. An Internal Affairs detective and a Benton County police officer, will help put private detective E.J. Cord onto the trial of his friend's killer. He will have to cross the U.S. and in doing so, will run into a host of misadventures. Kidnapping, drugs, and murder, will be on his menu. Will he ever be able to quiet the guilt that constantly haunts his dreams...that he was the cause of her murder? Her murdered friends only transgression, was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The 'time and place' was ever having known E.J. Cord.

'Kimmerer blends, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet's oldest plants' Guardian 'Bewitching ... a masterwork ... a glittering read in its entirety' Maria Popova, Brainpickings Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. In these interwoven essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as within the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Gathering No Moss is the autobiography of a possibly autistic child, born in 1925, who, idiosyncratically educated, grew up to see out, as a member of the Colonial Service, the end of the British Empire in East Africa. In later service with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, he witnessed novice states exulting in new-found independence. His last appointment, as deputy director of the Centre for International Briefing, at Farnham Castle in Surrey, was in an organisation devoted to inculcating, in those going ‘abroad', better understanding of cross-cultural relations. Post-retirement, he keeps an eye, Pooter-like, on our changing world.