Laura has it all: a great job, a loving family, a new husband, and a house in her hometown, where she can watch her sister, Taylor, grow up. But one month after her wedding, Laura and her family receive shocking news: Taylor has Batten disease. A rare, fatal disease that will cause Taylor to go blind, suffer seizures, and lose the ability to walk and talk. There is no cure. Laura thought she'd get to watch her baby sister grow up, but instead she'll have to watch her die. Unwilling to take no cure for an answer, Laura founds a charity with family and friends, Taylor's Tale, to save children with the disease. Meanwhile, Taylor starts running, completing her first race blind. Inspired, Laura, a lifelong runner, begins running in half marathons to raise money and awareness. And also to run away from the pain. Taylor's Tale becomes a world leader in the fight against Batten disease, but not quickly enough to save Taylor. Stripped of her faith, Laura falls into a dark despair. But Taylor's unwavering courage in the face of certain death gives Laura a renewed sense of purpose to turn her family's tragedy into an opportunity--to ensure others won't have to suffer as her sister has suffered. Run to the Light is Laura's inspiring account of how she found the courage to face indescribable loss, and of what it means to really believe.

George Mendoza's blindness developed at age 15, while he was training for his school's basketball team. After struggling in vain against his loss and his deep depression, he visited a small rural sanctuary in New Mexico and was blessed with a miracle. This is the story of his victory against darkness. Subject of a PBS-TV documentary, Mendoza will be featured in an upcoming issue of People magazine.

A bona fide “instant classic” (Doug Stanhope) novel that tells the story of a road comic crashing and burning by acclaimed comedian Sam Tallent Billy Ray Schafer stepped off the plane in Amarillo, Texas, with twenty-six hundred dollars tucked down the leg of his black ostrich-skin cowboy boot. He walked to baggage claim slowly, jelly-legged and nearing lucidity, coming out from under the Xanax he snorted before the flight. Debauched, divorced, and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father—comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when opportunity doesn't come—or worse—it comes and goes? “In vivid, electric sentences that read like cinematic tracking shots,” (Denver Post) Tallent hurls you into an absolute mess of a man’s life as we search for the mercy he does not want.

Nathan Millward had a dream, he wanted to ride across the world on a small motorbike. A decommissioned Australia Post bike, to be precise. Nathan hit the road on his clapped out postie bike, from Sydney to Darwin then through Southeast Asia and onwards to Pakistan and China and the home run through Europe.

How could something we have for free—our bare feet—be better for running than $150 shoes? The truth is that running in shoes is high-impact, unstable, and inflexible. Shoes promote a heel-centric ground strike, which weakens your feet, knees, and hips, and leads to common running injuries. In contrast, barefoot running is low-impact, forefoot-centric, stable, and beneficial to your body. It encourages proper form and strengthens your feet in miraculous ways. When you run in shoes, you not only risk developing poor form, but you also hinder the natural relationship with the ground that running facilitates. Barefoot running restores the delightful sensory and spiritual connections to the earth that you were meant to experience. Barefoot Running offers the only step-by-step direction runners need at any age to overcome injuries, run faster than ever, and rediscover the pure joy of running. Once you tear off your shoes and learn to dance with nature, you’ll tread lightly and freely, hearing only the earth’s symphony and feeling only the dirt beneath your feet. Hit the ground running with revolutionary techniques for starting out slowly, choosing minimalist footwear, navigating rough weather and rugged terrain, and building your feet into living shoes.

A large segment of the population struggles with feelings of being detached from themselves and their loved ones. They feel flawed, and blame themselves. Running on Empty will help them realize that they're suffering not because of something that happened to them in childhood, but because of something that didn't happen. It's the white space in their family picture, the background rather than the foreground. This will be the first self-help book to bring this invisible force to light, educate people about it, and teach them how to overcome it.

Parkinson's disease is a neurological disorder with cardinal motor signs of resting tremor, bradykinesia and lead-pipe rigidity. In addition, many patients display non-motor symptoms, including a diminished sensation of smell, gastrointestinal problems, various disorders of sleep and some cognitive impairment. These clinical features - particularly the motor signs - manifest after a progressive death of many dopaminergic neurones in the brain. Although currently available, conventional therapies can reduce the signs of the disease, the progression of this neuronal death has proved difficult to slow or stop, and the condition is relentlessly progressive. Hence, there is a real need to develop a treatment that is neuroprotective, one that slows the pathology of the disease effectively. At present, there are several neuroprotective therapies in the experimental pipeline, but these are for the patients of tomorrow. This book focuses on two therapies that are readily available for the patients of today. They involve the use of exercise and light (i.e. photobiomodulation, the use of red to infrared light therapy (λ=600-1070nm) on body tissues). The two therapies are tied together in several ways. First, in animal models of Parkinson's disease, they each have been shown to offer the key feature of neuroprotection, stimulating a series of built-in protective mechanisms within the neurones, that helps their survival, to self-protect and/or self-repair. There are also some promising indications of neuroprotection and many beneficial outcomes in parkinsonian patients. Further, both exercise and light therapies are similar in that they are non-invasive and safe to use, with no known adverse side-effects, making their combination with the conventional therapies, such as dopamine replacement drug therapy and deep brain stimulation, all the more feasible. Given the heterogeneity of Parkinson's disease in humans, tackling the condition from a range of different angles - with a number of different therapies - would only serve to enhance the positive outcomes. This book considers the use of exercise and light therapies, proposing that they have the potential to make a powerful "dynamic duo", offering a most effective neuroprotective treatment option to patients.