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The clear-eyed, self-aware reflections of a seasoned American journalist on the steps (and missteps) of a dedicated life.

This is the story of a successful English professor’s ten-year marriage to a much younger Nigerian woodcarver whose motives for marrying her she has chosen not to investigate. It’s her second marriage, and she has determined that singleness is not a state she would willingly choose over being the wife of a charming, good-looking man who has grown up in a small Nigerian village and followed generations of woodcarvers in his family.Married life for the two involves living on two continents—and, Kate Ellis learns, life on her new husband’s side is not monogamous. While the discovery is initially painful, she does not regret the gamble she took in joining her life to his. She comes to believe that what matters is not the fall itself but how one looks back over it.When she does this, she sees an adventure that has left her with a closet full of beautiful Nigerian clothes and a vividly poignant story to tell of the vast differences that underlie an intimacy between cultures that our recent historical and economic globalization has brought into being.

Jim Gold excels as a writer in the joys of improbability. His stories seize upon the most unlikely of heroes and heroines, and plunge them into situations none of us could ever imagine. They come to us with a hilarious assortment of odd backgrounds, very strange attitudes,and utterly surprising needs and ambitions. Some of them are people. Some are animals, and others plants. There are guys and gals who worry about their sex lives or their deaths, a talking turnip, a cloud with Oedipal problems, a whole world of vivid creations. And they're all inescapable,irresistible-a tangle of living neurons and flesh we can't help but be drawn to because they so often, and so surprisingly,remind us of ourselves. These invented souls hint of our own needs, our own frailties. . .and our own triumphs. They will leave you a happier soul.

When Nathaniel Norton—who had studied law at Yale but became the head of the real estate department of Met Life instead—bought a house in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1908, he may or may not have imagined that his family would occupy it uninterrupted for four generations.  To us, it’s inconceivable.  It wasn’t unheard-of then.This book describes in intimate, highly readable detail what being in such a family was like.  It is a very old family.  Norton was born in 1839, a century before the author.  “In 1639,” she writes, “a Thomas Norton, or Norville, emigrated from Guilford, England, to Guilford, Connecticut. . . .  Six centuries before that, in 1066, his ancestor Le Seigneur de Norville had sailed with William the Conqueror from Normandy to England. The Seigneur, a constable, had married into the house of Valois.  Those were my maternal ancestors.  My paternal ancestors also came to England with William I, in particular Robert of Meulan, whose surname was Beaumont.  Another line of Nortons descended from Baldwin I, Count of Flanders, who married Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald and great-granddaughter of Charlemagne, and produced Matilda, later the wife of William the Conqueror.”  This history has contributed profoundly to the habits of mind, the sense of graciousness, and the dry wit of successive generations of the Norton, Hazelton, and Beaumont families.  And it achieves a rich, incisive expression in the hands of Natalie Beaumont, author of The Short Side of Paradise (Full Court Press, 2015), an earlier memoir in the same breezy, nonchalant narrative style.

It takes courage to turn a new leaf, a passion for self- discovery, and a sense of fun. The New Leaf journals, filled with wisdom and surprise, describe a life lived on its own terms. The author echoes our own passions, fears, and hopes in ways that reveal us to ourselves with humor and insight. Its free spirit makes us laugh and coaxes us to be ourselves. Jim Gold brings a love of people, and of music, dance, languages, and cultures to all his work. Jim has kept journals for over thirty years. They cover all his pursuits, his struggles to remain gleefully free in a world of restraints, and his hunger to discover the vastness of the world around him and of the inner life. In making the New Leaf journals available to a wider audience, Full Court Press hopes to reveal Gold's keen eye for the truth and the preposterous to readers.

It takes courage to turn a new leaf, a passion for self- discovery, and a sense of fun. The New Leaf journals, filled with wisdom and surprise, describe a life lived on its own terms. The author echoes our own passions, fears, and hopes in ways that reveal us to ourselves with humor and insight. Its free spirit makes us laugh and coaxes us to be ourselves. Jim Gold brings a love of people, and of music, dance, languages, and cultures to all his work. Jim has kept journals for over thirty years. They cover all his pursuits, his struggles to remain gleefully free in a world of restraints, and his hunger to discover the vastness of the world around him and of the inner life. In making the New Leaf journals available to a wider audience, Full Court Press hopes to reveal Gold's keen eye for the truth and the preposterous to readers.

It takes courage to turn a new leaf, a passion for self- discovery, and a sense of fun. The New Leaf journals, filled with wisdom and surprise, describe a life lived on its own terms. The author echoes our own passions, fears, and hopes in ways that reveal us to ourselves with humor and insight. Its free spirit makes us laugh and coaxes us to be ourselves. Jim Gold brings a love of people, and of music, dance, languages, and cultures to all his work. Jim has kept journals for over thirty years. They cover all his pursuits, his struggles to remain gleefully free in a world of restraints, and his hunger to discover the vastness of the world around him and of the inner life. In making the New Leaf journals available to a wider audience, Full Court Press hopes to reveal Gold's keen eye for the truth and the preposterous to readers.

Jim Gold has been an indispensable voice in the international folk dance community as a folk dance teacher,choreographer, and musician. He is also the president of Jim Gold International and organizes folk tours to such exotic countries as Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Norway, Albania,Romania, Argentina, Cuba, Hungary, Croatia,Slovenia, and Ireland, and more. This book is a product of extensive research into the languages, cultural histories, and folk dances local people have performed for centuries. Mr. Gold intends it as the first reference work of its kind-a repository of movements and dance steps, captured in his choreographies,created over many years. To help you learn these dances, each choreography includes a YouTube video link.

In struggling to save her beloved dog's life as the town she's living in attempts to kill all its dogs, a young girl discovers the meaning of courage.

What happens when a beloved spouse suddenly and irrevocably leaves your life? Overnight, the life Raechel and Michael Bratnick had planned disappeared, the territory ahead chaotic and uncertain. At the outset Michael was the owner of an industrial public relations company, a healer and poet: Illness ripped his life to shreds. Without any nursing skill, Raechel suddenly became his nurse and medical advocate. Big questions like how could this malignancy sneak into their lives without a warning had to wait as his condition required constant care. After he died, she dreamed and grieved her way into peace. Dawn and dawning are themes throughout this book: His death at dawn propelled her into the dawning of a new life. Her journey takes her through shock, raw emotions, regrets, pain, and humor, as she gradually transitions into appreciation, forgiveness, and an understanding of this part of her life. A conversation between Raechel and Michael is woven in through their poetry and journals. The book concludes with a view of the author's new life, eleven years after losing her soul mate

CAROLETURBIN’S SOUVENIR COMBINES vivid writing, photographs, and art to tell the arresting story of growing up in Queens, New York, in the1940s and ‘50s with a distant mother and a mercurial father who sold souvenirs of New York to retail shops in Times Square and Chinatown. Finagler,practical jokester, gambler, and later magician—he could swing from angry rejector to loving parent. The author escaped for two decades to Europe and California,becoming an artist, feminist, and historian. Much later, when he was an old man and she was middle-aged, she realized that he’d encouraged her art by advising, “If you’re afraid, draw it,” and that she shared his strong emotions and determination. She drew images of plumbing that conveyed her visceral childhood fears and made peace with him, drawing his portrait on his deathbed.

David Jones has lived a rich and varied life, the highlights of which are beautifully presented in this wry and irresistibly intelligent collection. Not many people can saythey’ve had a successful career as a structural engineer, boxed andcompeted in swimming and track-and-field tournaments, lived andworked in Tanganyika and Uganda, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, soldprograms at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, acted and sungprofessionally—and written a book about all of it.Of his entertainment career in particular, he says ,“The big reward of performing has been the great people and brilliant musicians I have met over the years. I have had good times, interspersed with disappointments and, sometimes, failure. Failure in performance isusually self-inflicted, mostly due to lack of preparation. . . . I  have had some minor success in theater and have been well reviewed. One reviewer said, ‘David Jones is a lusty old goat.’ How can you beat that?” It is precisely this amalgam of sober irreverence that informsthe memorable moments in the author’s life and makes them so readable. 

The searing first-person account of how the author's family escaped the unrestrained extermination of the Bahá'í community in Iran during and after the revolution that brought the current regime to power.