As Cosmopolitan's professional agony aunt for the last forty years, Irma Kurtz has had to deal with the most intimate problems of successive generations of readers, while having to keep up with the changing mores and attitudes in British and American society. In these memoirs, she looks back on the seismic transformations that have taken place over the last four decades, as well as her own hectic and often difficult life as a single mother from America living in London. Warm, funny, and perceptive, brimming with wisdom and insight, My Life in Agony is a meditation on the subjects that tend to concern and confuse us the most--from mother-daughter relationships to eating disorders, office politics, and those perennial areas of interest: love and sex.

As Cosmopolitan's professional agony aunt for the last forty years, Irma Kurtz has had to deal with the most intimate problems of successive generations of readers, while having to keep up with the changing mores and attitudes in British and American society. In these memoirs, she looks back on the seismic transformations that have taken place over the last four decades, as well as her own hectic and often difficult life as a single mum from America living in London.Warm, funny and perceptive, brimming with wisdom and insight, My Life in Agony is a meditation on the subjects that tend to concern and confuse us the most - from mother-daughter relationships through to eating disorders, office politics and those perennial areas of interest: love and sex.

The Agony of Life is a book about unconditional love, a comedy, a tragedy, a cry for the people, a cry for the nation, a cry for humanity, an agony of life and a social commentary. It is a book that narrates the agony and the hurdles that the author had to pass through in life from his birth and the abandonment by his mother, was again abandoned and left for dead during the Nigerian-Biafran war, miraculously survived the war and severe malnutrition and was reunited with his family long after the war. How he survived the countless illnesses and other obstacles that life presented to him.

A brave, intimate, beautifully crafted memoir by a survivor of the tsunami that struck the Sri Lankan coast in 2004 and took her entire family. On December 26, Boxing Day, Sonali Deraniyagala, her English husband, her parents, her two young sons, and a close friend were ending Christmas vacation at the seaside resort of Yala on the south coast of Sri Lanka when a wave suddenly overtook them. She was only to learn later that this was a tsunami that devastated coastlines through Southeast Asia. When the water began to encroach closer to their hotel, they began to run, but in an instant, water engulfed them, Sonali was separated from her family, and all was lost. Sonali Deraniyagala has written an extraordinarily honest, utterly engrossing account of the surreal tragedy of a devastating event that all at once ended her life as she knew it and her journey since in search of understanding and redemption. It is also a remarkable portrait of a young family's life and what came before, with all the small moments and larger dreams that suddenly and irrevocably ended.

Widely famed as the tea guru of Berkeley's Chez Panisse, Gustafson, in this book, creates intersections between her own life and her experiences with tea -- from domestic tea rituals in her St. Paul, MN, upbringing, to her Irish honeymoon where she encountered Barry's of Cork tea, to her first meeting with the venerable Mr. Twining, of the Twining tea empire, in search of the incomparable 275th Anniversary black Yunnan tea. Gustafson's approach to the minutiae of the tea experience is a magically macroscopic one -- she makes the subject of tea as ecstatic ritual come alive through biographical detail, storytelling, recipes, and reminiscences.

In a society that pushes conformity, how can you be courageously authentic despite fear of judgment? Award-winning leadership and diversity expert Ritu Bhasin gives you the tools to make this happen. This is more than a call to "be yourself"-it's a rally to disrupt the status quo, bring your differences to the light, and help others do the same.

Little Miss Sunshine meets Room in this quirky, heartwarming story of friendship, loyalty and discovery. It's Newfoundland, 1986. Fourteen-year-old Bun O'Keefe has lived a solitary life in an unsafe, unsanitary house. Her mother is a compulsive hoarder, and Bun has had little contact with the outside world. What she's learned about life comes from the random books and old VHS tapes that she finds in the boxes and bags her mother brings home. Bun and her mother rarely talk, so when Bun's mother tells Bun to leave one day, she does. Hitchhiking out of town, Bun ends up on the streets of St. John's, Newfoundland. Fortunately, the first person she meets is Busker Boy, a street musician who senses her naivety and takes her in. Together they live in a house with an eclectic cast of characters: Chef, a hotel dishwasher with culinary dreams; Cher, a drag queen with a tragic past; Big Eyes, a Catholic school girl desperately trying to reinvent herself; and The Landlord, a man who Bun is told to avoid at all cost. Through her experiences with her new roommates, and their sometimes tragic revelations, Bun learns that the world extends beyond the walls of her mother's house and discovers the joy of being part of a new family -- a family of friends who care.