Thorndike Press large print nonfiction series

Tells the dramatic life-and-death tale of the Vermont native who, in April of 2008, was held captive on a tiny lifeboat off Somalia's anarchic, gun-plagued shores.

"A layabout mutt turned therapy dog leads her owner to a new understanding of the good life. At loose ends with her daughter leaving home and her husband on the road, Sue Halpern decided to give herself and Pransky, her under-occupied Labradoodle, a new leash--er, lease--on life by getting the two of them certified as a therapy dog team. Smart, spirited, and instinctively compassionate, Pransky turned out to be not only a terrific therapist but an...

"The spectacularly dramatic memoir of a woman whose curiosity about the world led her from rural Canada to imperiled and dangerous countries on every continent, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity in Somalia--a story of courage, resilience, and extraordinary grace. At the age of eighteen, Amanda Lindhout moved from her hardscrabble Alberta hometown to the big city--Calgary--and worked as a cocktail waitress, saving her tips so she...

The popular film and television actor evaluates the personal philosophy that has enabled his positive outlook in spite of his battle with degenerative Parkinson's disease, in an uplifting account that considers how he has become a happier and more satisfied person by recognizing the gifts of everyday life.

A brilliant, controversial, and fascinating biography of those who were, in the mid-nineteenth century, the center of American thought and literature.


Concord, Massachusetts, 1849. At various times, three houses on the same road were home to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry and John Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. Among their friends and neighbors: Henry James, Emily Dickinson,...

The liberation of Europe and defeat of the Third Reich is an epic story of courage and calamity, of miscalculation and enduring triumph. Sixty years after America joined the struggle, Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the Allied victory without a grasp of what unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943, where American officers learned how to lead, soldiers learned how to hate, and an army learned what it takes to vanquish a formidable...

"Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. Dick was one of the young men of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Doris was a White House Fellow and worked directly for Lyndon Johnson, later assisting on his memoir. The Goodwins' last great adventure involved opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents...

"We spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting our attention. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we're interrupted by others. In Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark reveals these and more surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention. She shows how much of what we think we know is wrong, including...

"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly...

"The definitive, fascinating, all-reaching biography of Dr. Seuss Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon. His work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. More than twenty-five years after his death, his books continue to find new readers, now grossing over half a billion dollars in sales. His whimsical illustrations and silly, simple rhymes are timeless favorites because, quite simply, he makes us laugh. Theodor Geisel, however,...