Kim Lee is a psychotherapist with more than 20 years of experience helping clients work through difficulties with relationships and break-downs in communication, including issues of trust and infidelity. Along with her husband, she is also a swinger, a secret unknown to even her children or closest friends. In this memoir, Kim Lee takes readers inside the secret society of swingers, also known as "the lifestyle." Sex plays a dominant role, but the book's focus is also on human connection and relationships beyond sex. She shares the difficulty of working through her husband's affair and navigating relationship issues that both swingers and non-swingers commonly face. Lee invites the reader to learn from her mistakes and see how to better safeguard their own relationship, regardless of niche lifestyle choice. While marriage is imperfect and hard, she demonstrates that it can also be vibrant, healthy, and even sexy, if both partners put in the work and communicate honestly with each other.

Drawing on an extensive survey of real people and over 40 years of research, this revealing volume proposes that a nonmonogamous lifestyle may be healthier for marriages than a monogamous one. Based on an exhaustive survey into the lives of real people, Swinging in America: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the 21st Century concludes that nonmonogamous relationships such as swinging and polyamory offer a new blueprint for combining sex and love—one that may prove more in line with the way people actually live their lives in our society. Swinging in America begins with what we know about swingers and the swinging lifestyle, based on personal narratives and over 40 years of sociological research comparing swinging and non-swinging couples on factors such as personal happiness, marital satisfaction, psychological stability, and personal values. The second half of the book explores the historical rise and contemporary decline of monocentrism—the sexually monogamous marriage as the organizing principle underlying our culture—and the implications of this decline for new nonmonogamous relationships and marriages.

I didn't realize what a piece of crap I was until I died. The Grim, the post-mortem chaperone who collected me, is the crankiest Death in the greater Kansas City area. Understandable, since her job is to bag the souls of the worthless and rotten. Apparently I'm so crummy they made me her apprentice. There are so many other kinds of Death, and of all of them, I get lassoed to Miss Buzzkill, who loves to remind me I'm hers with her big, green gargoyle finger, pointing and giving me her spooky come-hither. As the Grim's new involuntary Lackey, some of the rules are easy: ✓ Avoid inter-office conflicts — Mind your own Death's business. ✓ Shelve your souls before exiting the locker room. ✓ No Death Suits in the hot tub. But other dos-and-don'ts I just can't handle: — Never getting a love of my life. — Giving up the love of my death. In my new hereafter, the Grim gives me two options — stay and help her take souls, including the love of my death, or refuse and condemn those souls to nothingness forever. I'm opting for door number three — sacrificing myself to get back to life. Which, I'm pretty sure I can do, if I can get the most spine-tingling jeebie-making Death in the Underworld to shove me in his moan-oozing Gray Box of the Unknown. It's not like I'd come back as a possum. Right? If you like snarky, warm-hearted, page-turners with out-of-the-ordinary characters, you'll love Stalking Death. Follow seventeen-year-old Tyro and the other quirky Deaths of Kansas City in this darkly-comedic young adult fantasy. Buy Stalking Death today to start reading Tyro's sparklingly-irregular belly-flop into the afterlife.

Since 1872 when traveling salesman Aaron Montgomery Ward realized he could eliminate the middleman and sell goods directly to his customers, Americans have had an ongoing love affair with the mail-order catalog, which continues undiminished even in today's online-driven world. The practical can find deals on furniture and clothing in L.L.Bean and Sears, the extravagant can consider his and hers matching helicopters, windmills, hot-air balloons, and submarines in the Neiman Marcus Fantasy Catalog; those looking to get their pulses racing can browse Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch; while our inner swashbuckler can travel the world through the pages of the J. Peterman Owner's Manual where Moroccan caftans, Russian Navy t-shirts, and wooden water buckets from rural China entice the imagination. In Catalog: The Illustrated History of Mail Order Shopping, Robin Cherry traces the timeline of these snapshots from American history and discovers along the way how we dressed, decorated our houses, worked, played, and got around. From corsets to bell-bottoms, from baby-doll dresses and Doc Martens all the way to iPods, the history of these catalogs is the history of our lives and our culture. GIs during World War II were kept company by the models in the pages of lingerie catalogs; hockey goalies fashioned makeshift shin guards out of them during the Great Depression, and creative children across the country still play with homemade paper dolls cut from clothing catalogs. A number of celebrities got their start modeling for catalogs: Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Katherine Heigl, Matthew Fox, and Angelina Jolie. Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan both got their first guitars from the Sears catalog. Organized into categories such as clothing, food, animals, and houses, author Robin Cherry explores the vivid stories behind Sears, Montgomery Ward, Lillian Vernon, Harry & David, Jackson & Perkins, and of course, 45 years of the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book. Insightful historical commentary places these catalogs in their social context, making this book a visual pleasure and a historically important piece of Americana.

The dialogue conducted via the press, television, advertising and the opinion polls beween politicians and the people in the 1997 campaign and its run-up is analyzed here. Special attention is paid to the innovations and changes that marked the 1997 campaign.