Living in the fast lane and letting the good times roll. Exotic cars, expensive jewelry, opulent vacation homes and a seven fi gure bank account. This real life, Hollywood drama opens with what seems a wonderful dream, but then reality... A fleet of shiny black SUVs come screeching into his driveway. With his wife held at gunpoint by federal agents, Jeff is dragged away to prison for “questionable business practices.” 41196: The Number That Changed My Life is a riveting, true life story of Jeff Snyder. Through a series of life altering events, Jeff became a cooperating witness against his father; the criminal mastermind behind numerous Ponzi schemes, stolen identities, money laundering scams, and who eventually became a fugitive living in Central America. Through this author’s journey, you will witness an incredible outcome as Jeff is dragged off to jail a broken man and manages to find the strength to overcome his life’s biggest adversity. This transformational saga will keep you on the edge of your seat, stunned and dumbfounded, and will alter the way you view your personal adversities.

While on assignment in Alaska, newspaper reporter Rachel Sullivan stumbles across the aftermath of a brazen attack by a radical eco-terrorist group called Earth Fights Back. Driven by a thirst for notoriety and a desire to protect the planet, the organization is leaving a trail of destruction and dead bodies in its wake while eluding the FBI. When things turn personal, Rachel vows to bring them down herself...or die trying.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Anna Quindlen presents a “swift and compelling paean to the joys of books” (Booklist). “Like the columns she used to write for the New York Times, [How Reading Changed My Life] is tart, smart, full of quirky insights, lapidary, and a pleasure to read.”—Publishers Weekly “Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. . . . Yet of all the many things in which we recognize universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in a chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. . . . I read because I loved it more than any activity on earth.”—from How Reading Changed My Life

No Pot, No Window is a true story about my life starting in the year 1951 when I was born in Marshall, Texas, to poor, uneducated parents. This book is intended to be a motivator and inspiration to all the people struggling to survive financially as I did for the majority of my life. The expression ?no pot, no window? means you are so poor that you don?t have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out. I believe poverty, lack of education, a negative home environment, alcohol and/or drug abuse, bad judgment, a single parent home, disease/illness, and sometimes just plain bad luck keeps the syndrome of ?no pot, no window? perpetuating generation after generation. My abusive alcoholic father abandoned my two sisters and me when I was nine years old, and my codependent mother was absent from my life for many years. After my father left and my parents divorced, my mother spent the rest of her life looking for another husband to support her. She was married nine times and never did find her Prince Charming, just another drunk she met at a bar and dragged home. When I was ten years old, my mother sent my two sisters and me to live with her parents for over three years, and during this period she was completely absent from our lives. My maternal grandparents, who were survivors of the Great Depression of 1929, were very tight with their money and affection. They really did not want to raise three young children but decided we would be a valuable asset as farmhands on their five-acre farm. My mother came back into my life when I was thirteen years old and the saga of stepfathers began. At the age of sixteen, I had a job, a car, and was self-sufficient. Unfortunately, I was also a juvenile delinquent because I had little or no parental supervision. For lack of any other options, I joined the military in 1969, during the height of the Vietnam War, and began the long journey of becoming an adult. Due to my immaturity and poor judgment, I was married and divorced three times before the age of thirty and became a single parent to my only child. When I was thirty-two years old, I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer and spent the next five years struggling to stay alive physically and financially. With the assistance of the military, I was able to obtain my bachelor of arts degree from the University of Mississippi in 1982 and a masters of forensic science from George Washington University in 1986. After twenty-one years of active duty service, I subsequently retired as a lieutenant from the United States Navy in 1993. I refused to accept and was able to overcome the ?no pot, no window? plight because of my perseverance, hard work, and most importantly, advanced education. I changed my life from sour lemons to sweet lemonade!

A New York Times bestseller! A pioneering and timely study of how to navigate life's biggest transitions with meaning, purpose, and skill Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Secrets of Happy Families and Council of Dads, has long explored the stories that give our lives meaning. Galvanized by a personal crisis, he spent the last few years crisscrossing the country, collecting hundreds of life stories in all fifty states from Americans who’d been through major life changes—from losing jobs to losing loved ones; from changing careers to changing relationships; from getting sober to getting healthy to simply looking for a fresh start. He then spent a year coding these stories, identifying patterns and takeaways that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change. What Feiler discovered was a world in which transitions are becoming more plentiful and mastering the skills to manage them is more urgent for all of us. The idea that we’ll have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness is hopelessly outdated. We all feel unnerved by this upheaval. We’re concerned that our lives are not what we expected, that we’ve veered off course, living life out of order. But we’re not alone. Life Is in the Transitions introduces the fresh, illuminating vision of the nonlinear life, in which each of us faces dozens of disruptors. One in ten of those becomes what Feiler calls a lifequake, a massive change that leads to a life transition. The average length of these transitions is five years. The upshot: We all spend half our lives in this unsettled state. You or someone you know is going through one now. The most exciting thing Feiler identified is a powerful new tool kit for navigating these pivotal times. Drawing on his extraordinary trove of insights, he lays out specific strategies each of us can use to reimagine and rebuild our lives, often stronger than before. From a master storyteller with an essential message, Life Is in the Transitions can move readers of any age to think deeply about times of change and how to transform them into periods of creativity and growth.

(Applause Books). What was the play that changed your life? What was the play that inspired you; that showed you something entirely new; that was so thrilling or surprising, breathtaking or poignant, that you were never the same? Nineteen of today's most gifted playwrights respond in this most revealing and personal book, published by Applause Books and presented by the American Theatre Wing, founder of The Tony Awards. From Edward Albee's 1935 visit to New York's Hippodrome Theatre to see Jimmy Durante (and an elephant) in Rodgers and Hart's Jumbo, to Diana Son's twelfth-grade field trip in 1983 to see Diane Venora play Hamlet at The Public Theater, from David Henry Hwang's seminal San Francisco encounter with Equus to a young Beth Henley's epiphany after seeing her mother in a "Green Bean Man costume," The Play That Changed My Life offers readers a unique peek into the theatrical influences of some of the nation's most important dramatists. The book is filled with tributes, memories, anecdotes and other insights that connect past to present and make this volume an instant "must have" for anyone who adores the theatre. Also in the book are pieces by David Auburn, Jon Robin Baitz, Nilo Cruz, Christopher Durang, Charles Fuller, A. R. Gurney, Tina Howe, David Ives, Donald Margulies, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, John Patrick Shanley, Regina Taylor, and Doug Wright, as well as an introduction by Paula Vogel. All together, the playwrights featured here have won more than 40 Tony Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, Obies, and MacArthur genius grants.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The eagerly anticipated baking bible from America's most respected authority: 100+ recipes for cookies, cakes, breads, breakfast pastries, and much more. A Best Book of the Year: NPR, Los Angeles Times, Epicurious "Nancy Silverton baked a brioche so perfect that it brought Julia Child to tears...Nancy showed us how to strip away the extras and spotlight the essentials. She’s still doing that and we’re all still learning from her." —Dorie Greenspan, author of Dorie's Cookies Nancy Silverton made her reputation as the original pastry chef for Wolfgang Puck's restaurant Spago. Biting into a particularly delicious peanut butter cookie one day, she and had an epiphany: every single thing we bake should taste this good. And so she decided to return to her roots, and set to work perfecting the rest of the American baking canon. From Lattice-Topped Apple Pie to Carrot Cake with Brown Butter Cream Cheese Frosting (the secret? Carrot puree) to Cornbread (is it too much to ask that it actually taste like corn?), she shares recipes for the platonic ideals of our most beloved baked goods. Alongside the classics—Lemon Bars, Key Lime Pie, Layered Buttermilk Biscuits—Silverton includes a handful of her own inventions: Double-Decker Chocolate Cookies (double the fun!), Iced Raisin Bars (a better fig newton), and Chocolate Brandy Cake (chocolate and brandy!)—all sure to become future classics. With more than a hundred perfected recipes, The Cookie That Changed My Life is a veritable encyclopedia of the very best things to bake.