Foster Memoir

In 2012, Hakeem al-Araibi was a promising young player on Bahrain's national football team when he was arrested for attacking a police station during the Arab Spring, despite television footage showing him playing soccer at the time of the alleged attack. After three months of torture and wrongful imprisonment, Hakeem was released. He fled the country and made his way to Australia, where he was granted refugee status. Hakeem made a life here and was playing for the suburban Pascoe Vale Football Club, in Melbourne. He thought he was safe.

Rob Henderson was born to a drug-addicted mother and a father he never met, ultimately shuttling between ten different foster homes in California. When he was adopted into a loving family, he hoped that life would finally be stable and safe. He was wrong: tragedy, poverty and violence marked his adolescent years. An unflinching portrait of shattered families, desperation, and determination, Troubled recounts how Henderson eventually managed to find an escape route through the military, which led to an academic career at Yale and Cambridge

An adrenaline-fueled travel memoir of life in the wild among the planet’s most ferocious and fascinating predators. Over the last forty years, bestselling science-fiction writer Alan Dean Foster has journeyed around the globe to encounter nature’s most fearsome creatures. His travels have taken him into the heart of the Amazon rain forest on the trail of deadly tangarana ants, on an elephant ride across the sweeping green plains of central India in search of the elusive Bengal tiger, and into the waters of the Australian coast to come face-to-face with great white sharks. Packed with pulse-pounding adventure and spiked with rapier wit, Predators I Have Known is a thrilling look at life and death in the wild.

This book starts where the first book, The Unknown Mongol, ended. The year is 1998, and Scott "Junior" Ereckson, the national president of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, has been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. Because he's an ex-felon and it’s his second strike, he's been sentenced to 14 years in state prison.

Like many Germans, Berlin schoolboy Erwin Bartmann fell under the spell of the Zeitgeist cultivated by the Nazis. Convinced he was growing up in the best country in the world, he dreamt of joining the Leibstandarte, Hitler's elite Waffen SS unit. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and just 17-years-old, Erwin fulfilled his dream on Mayday 1941, when he gave up his apprenticeship at the Glaser bakery in Memeler Strasse and walked into the Lichterfelde barracks in Berlin as a raw, volunteer recruit.

An adventure story, love story, travelogue, naturalist memoir, and spiritual guide, Craig Foster's Amphibious Soul is a scientist and adventurer’s perspective on “rewilding”—developing a deep connection to our animal selves that can reinvigorate our lives. Told in Craig’s warm and passionate voice, this extraordinary book will change not only the way we interact with the natural world, but the way we fundamentally see ourselves.

Maggie Hartley is one of the UK's most prolific foster mothers. These heartwarming and inspiring short stories show the power of a foster mother's love, and her determination to help the children who come into her care. Includes 'Too Scared to Cry', 'The Girl No One Wanted' and 'A Family for Christmas'.

Seven Bones is the story of one of the more bizarre murder investigations in Australia’s history. Two wives die in suspicious circumstances: co-incidence or, as husband Thomas Keir describes it, ‘bad luck’? Three years after Thomas Keir alleged his first wife, Jean, deserted him and her young son for another man, his second wife, Rosalina, Jean’s cousin, lay scorched and strangled on her bed. Arriving on the scene, Detective Peter Seymour realised he was either dealing with the world’s unluckiest husband or a serial wife killer.

Simon Peter, Andrew, James the son of Zebedee, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Jude, Simon, Judas, and Matthias - what happened to the men who answered Jesus' call to follow him? What impact did they have on the world? Where did they go and what did they do after Jesus' resurrection and ascension? In these fascinating profiles, Dr. McBirnie offers listeners a snapshot of the lives of each apostle.

'Is It My Fault Mummy?': seven-year-old Paris is trapped in a prison of guilt. Devastated after the death of her baby brother, Joel, Maggie faces one of her most heartbreaking cases yet as she tries to break down the wall of guilt surrounding this damaged little girl. 'A Desperate Cry for Help': 12-year-old Meg arrives at Maggie's after a fire destroys the children's home she's been living in. Traumatised by the fire and angry and vulnerable, having been put into care by her mother, Meg is lashing out at everyone around her.

Although Jodie is only eight years old, she is violent, aggressive, and has already been through numerous foster families. Her last hope is Cathy Glass. At the Social Services office, Cathy (an experienced foster carer) is pressured into taking Jodie as a new placement. Jodie's challenging behaviour has seen off five carers in four months. Despite her reservations, Cathy decides to take on Jodie to protect her from being placed in an institution.

The Confessions of St. Augustine is one of the most moving diaries ever recorded of a man's journey to the fountain of God's grace. Writing as a sinner, not a saint, Augustine shares his innermost thoughts and conversion experiences, and wrestles with the spiritual questions that have stirred the hearts of the thoughtful since time began.

When Sky and her older sister Avril were taken into care, the social workers knew this was a case like no other. Raised by unhinged parents who hoarded compulsively, creating horrific conditions no child should live in, the two girls arrived at foster carer Louise's home, neglected, malnourished and indoctrinated. Louise had to draw on all of her experience as one of Britain's leading foster carers to rehabilitate and change the course of their lives.

Since the late 19th century, the Foster family had been hand-making running shoes, supplying the likes of Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams - later immortalised in the film Chariots of Fire - as well as providing boots to most Football League clubs. But a family feud between Foster's father and uncle about the direction of their business led to Joe and his brother, Jeff, setting up a new company, inspired by the success of Adidas and Puma; and so Reebok was born.

It's men like Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone who gave Hell's Kitchen its name. In the mid-1970s, these two longtime friends take the reins of New York's Irish mob, using brute force to give it hitherto unthinkable power. Jimmy, a charismatic sociopath, is the leader. Mickey, whose memories of Vietnam torture him daily, is his enforcer. Together they make brutality their trademark, butchering bodies or hurling them out the window.

After parting ways with the eponymous McAfee Antivirus software company in 1994, John McAfee embarked on innumerable business, political, and criminal enterprises. From investing in cybersecurity and cryptocurrency to accusations of murdering his neighbor in Belize to making two unsuccessful bids for President of the United States—the latter attempt done in exile following a federal indictment—this larger-than-life man nurtured a rakish public profile while evading law enforcement for his involvement with drugs, weapons, and murder.

Shenandoah Chefalo is on a wholly dysfunctional journey through a childhood with neglectful, drug- and alcohol-addicted parents. She endures numerous moves in the middle of the night with just minutes to pack, multiple changes in schools, hunger, cruelty, and loneliness. Finally at the age of 13, Shen had had enough. After being abandoned by her mother for months at her grandmother's retirement community, she asks to be put into foster care. Surely she would fare better at a stable home than living with her mother?

In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.

Rüdiger Safranski's Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is the first definitive biography in a generation to tell the larger-than-life story of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Drawing upon the trove of letters, diaries, and notebooks Goethe left behind, as well as correspondence and criticism from Goethe's contemporaries, Safranski weaves a rich tale of Europe in the throes of revolution and of the man whose ideas heralded a new era.

In 2007, the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade posted to northeastern Afghanistan's Kunar Province. Battle Company, the best within the Brigade, was assigned the toughest Area of Operations. It was called the Korengal Valley. During their fifteen-month tour, Battle Company saw more combat than any unit since Vietnam. Raw and unapologetic, To Quell the Korengal is a first-hand account of life on the front lines.