The wedding that Thanksgiving weekend 1958 in Chicago should never have happened. Venus Ballesteros should have been on her way back to the Philippines. Hiro Tanamachi should have died in the war.Somehow, the man who had trained to die as a suicide submarine pilot in the Japanese Navy, and the woman whose hometown had been occupied by the Japanese, met 8,000 miles away from their homelands.

A Bomber Command book with a difference. Rear Gunner Pathfinders is the story of the air war over Germany as seen from the small Perspex bubble of a 'Tail-End Charlie' rear gunner in a Lancaster. Flying firstly with 626 squadron, and later 156 Pathfinder squadron, Ron Smith flew 65 operations and recorded them with the intensity brought on by the isolation of being cocooned in his lonely gun turret.

“What is a stroke?” This is the question that plagues Ron Smith as he emerges from the carpet bombing of his brain. The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke is a first-person account of a massive ischemic stroke to the brain stem. Smith takes the reader inside the experience and shows how recuperation happens ― the challenges of communication, the barriers to treatment, the frustrations of being misunderstood and written off, the role of memory in recovering identity, the power of continui...

You have asked questions that no lab can settle. Should you pull the lever if it saves 5 lives and ends 1. Is the person who wakes up with no memory of yesterday still you. Could your entire life be a simulation you cannot detect. This book puts 100 of those questions on the table, not to give you the answer key, but to train the muscle that finds answers under pressure.Each chapter is a short, vivid scene followed by the tug of war it creates in your mind. You step onto the footbr...

After a half century of farming, an old man takes one last walk across his land.

A troubled young man steps through the back door of a shop in a small town on a blistering August day. In a rampage that lasts less than 60 seconds, he kills six men and then himself. Maesie Mattsen is the only survivor of the killing spree, but the horror she witnessed has made her too afraid to leave the sanctuary of her backyard. Soon, she will have no choice.Fearing how their neighbors will treat them, the parents of the killer also feel like prisoners in their home. They exper...

Just before a man reports to prison, he and his sons have to deal with a dead horse.

The acquisition and procurement of major weapons systems is fraught with difficulties. They tend to be delivered late, over budget and unable to meet requirements. This Element provides an economic analysis of why this happens. Market structure, demand by the military and supply by the arms firms, shapes the conduct of the agents and generates the poor performance observed. The military are trying to counter an evolving threat, subject to a budget constraint, high R&D costs and new technol...

My purpose is to encourage and help anyone who feels stuck, who is not sure where they're going on this journey called life.For most of my 75 years, like so many of us, I have had self-doubts and fear of failure, and put myself in so many categories like 'I'm not very clever', 'I'm not good at many things' or 'Other people are smarter, born gifted at music, technology, public speaking and life in general'.A year ago, I published my first book – The Boxer: My Journey to Life...

St. Thomas' Roman Catholic Church in Keith, Banffshire Scotland, is a very attractive building with a fascinating history. The majority of the finance for the construction came from King Charles X of France, and the huge oil painting that is the altar piece was painted by the royal painter, Francois Dubois. Built in 1831, the Church sits on the highest point in Keith, and its copper dome is a landmark. This book provides a glimpse into the history of this magnificent church, the various pr...

When Ron suggested to his wife that he wanted to leave his well-paid job with the state government so that he could help people become fit and healthy, her reaction was, "Who the hell would pay you to do that?""I don't know," he replied. "But let's make it work."So began The Centre for Lifelong Health and Fitness in Mt Eliza, a pretty bayside community on the Mornington Peninsula, one hour south of Melbourne, Victoria.And so continued Ron's journey towards his own h...

Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith’s new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book’s forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and the psychology of beauty. With inspiration drawn from memoir, myth, history, fiction, and the visual arts, That Beauty in the Trees prese...