America's First Families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day. Full of stories and details by turns dramatic, humorous, and heartwarming, The Residence reveals daily life in the White House as it is really lived through the voices of the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and others who tend to the needs of the President and First...

Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality.

"A look at intriguing people and episodes from the history of the Granite State, from a bizarre French and Indian War battle to the state's first impeachment trial"--

Bill Bryson, known in England as "the funniest travel writer alive," returns to the States and walks the Appalachian Trail, starting in Hanover, New Hampshire. This tour of America's most outrageous absurdities presents his comic musings of the quirkiest aspects of life in America, right down to hardware-store lingo, tax-return instructions, and vulnerability to home injury ... proving that there's truly no place like home, especially if it's in America....

"In Death in Acadia, Randi Minetor gathers the stories of fatalities that have occurred in Maine's Acadia National Park, from falls to exposure to cardiac arrest--even getting swept out to sea--and presents dozens of misadventures"--

400 Things Cops Know shows police work on the inside, from the viewpoint of the regular cop on the beat, a profession that can range from rewarding to bizarre to terrifying, all within the course of a single eight-hour shift. Written by veteran police sergeant Adam Plantinga, 400 Things Cops Know brings the reader into life the way cops experience it: a life of danger, frustration, occasional triumph and plenty of grindingly hard routine work -- Publisher's...

"In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times book review) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them...

Men like John Wayne and John Lennon, Nolan Ryan and Bruce Lee, Cesar Chavez, Christopher Reeve, and Miles Davis have touched the lives of millions. But at home, to their children, they were not their public personas. They were Dad. Maybe Davis didn’t leave the office at five o’clock to come home and play catch with his son Erin, but the man we see through Erin’s eyes is so alive, so real, so not the “king of cool” (he taught his son to box,...

The American humorist, author, and radio contributor shares his most memorable work in a collection of stories and essays that feature him shopping for rare taxidermy, hitchhiking with a quadriplegic, and hand-feeding a carnivorous bird.