True Change

In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction - the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas - has long been the symbol of Cortés' bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere. But is this really what happened?

What if one moment — one impossible climb — changed everything? At eight years old, Ted Lazaris didn’t climb that towering tree in Milwaukee to be brave. He climbed because something called to him. What followed wasn’t just a fall — it was a moment that defied logic, rewrote destiny, and became the foundation of a lifetime of purpose. When Time Stood Still is a true story of survival, storytelling, and second chances. From near-death experiences to divine interventions, this deeply personal memoir reveals how the most ordinary beginnings can lead to the most extraordinary lives. ...

Since the Enlightenment, there has been a very simple but widely held assumption that we are a species of thinking individuals and that human behavior is best understood by examining the psychology of individuals. It appears, however, that this insight is plain wrong. The evidence from a number of leading behavioral and neuroscientists suggests that our species is designed as a herd or group animal. Mark Earls applies this evidence to the traditional mechanisms of marketing and consumer behavior, with a result that necessitates a complete rethinking about these subjects.

In 1983, Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, both serving life sentences at the U.S. Prison in Marion, Illinois, separately murdered two correction officers on the same day. The Bureau of Prisons condemned both men to the severest punishment that could legally be imposed, one created specifically for them. It was unofficially called "no human contact." Each initially spent nine months in a mattress-sized cell where the lights burned twenty-four hours a day. They were clothed only in boxer shorts, completely sealed off from the outside world with only their minds to occupy their time.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Ben Macintyre, bestselling author of Agent Zigzag, weaves together private documents, memories, letters and diaries, as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 and Naval Intelligence, to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat.

A bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army exploded at 2:54 a.m. on October 12, 1984. It was the last day of the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in the coastal town of Brighton, England. Rooms were obliterated, dozens of people wounded, five killed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in her suite when the explosion occurred; had she been just a few feet in another direction, flying tiles and masonry would have sliced her to ribbons. As it was, she survived—and history changed.

Every activist started out as a kid‚ and in some cases, they were kids when their activism began! But even the world's greatest champions of civil liberties had relatable interests and problems‚ often in the middle of extraordinary circumstances. Martin Luther King, Jr., loved fashion and argued with his dad about whether or not dancing was a sin. Harvey Milk had a passion for listening to opera music in different languages. Dolores Huerta was once wrongly accused of plagiarizing in school.

In this work from Polyvagal Theory pioneer Dr. Stephen Porges, you’ll find not only the origin and best practices of a groundbreaking new listening therapy—the Safe and Sound Protocol—but also real-life stories of transformation and healing on topics including addiction, COVID recovery, living with Parkinson’s disease, neurodivergence, and more.

Already a BBC documentary miniseries and excerpted in the Guardian, We Bought a Zoo is a profoundly moving portrait of an unforgettable family living in the most extraordinary circumstances. This touching memoir is set to be a major motion picture starring Scarlett Johansson and Matt Damon, in theaters December 23, 2011.

RatSnakes are rarely, if ever, visible to the public that they move among and risk their lives to protect. In fact, thanks to their cover personas, they are often assumed to be members of the clandestine criminal world that they investigate. Real-life undercover work is a far cry from the sexy, candy-colored world seen in Hollywood movies. Only those who are strong and clever enough will get inside and survive. Vincent A. Cefalu would know. He spent 30 years as an ATF undercover operative, in assignments ranging from the Symbionese Liberation Army to Asian organized crime.

Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy's murder. Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing Kennedy.

There is one question Canadians have asked Jody Wilson-Raybould more than any other: What can I do to help advance reconciliation? This has been true from her time as a leader of British Columbia’s First Nations, as a Member of Parliament, as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, within business communities, and when having conversations with people. Whether speaking as individuals, communities, organizations, or governments, people want to take concrete and tangible action that will make real change. They just need to know how to get started, or to take the next step.

Anna stopped counting the times she fell. Now she would take a stand... Anna Onisko has grown up under the shadow of her tyrannical stepfather. Now in her teens she is determined to escape him and fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher. But this is Uzhhorod, Czechoslovakia, the year is 1938 and the Hungarian occupation is about to tear Anna's life apart. Through wartime dangers and family betrayal, Anna has to find the strength to make impossible choices and protect those she loves even if it means sacrificing everything she cares about. Based on the true story of a woman of courage.

Danica Roem made national headlines when—as a transgender former frontwoman for a metal band and a political newcomer—she unseated Virginia's most notoriously anti-LGBTQ 26-year incumbent Bob Marshall as state delegate. But before Danica made history, she had to change her vision of what was possible in her own life. Doing so was a matter of storytelling: During her campaign, Danica hired an opposition researcher to dredge up every story from her past that her opponent might seize on to paint her negatively.

For twelve years the Golden State Killer terrorized California, stalking victims and killing without remorse. Then he simply disappeared, for the next forty-four years, until an amateur DNA sleuth opened her laptop. In I Know Who You Are, Barbara Rae-Venter reveals how she went from researching her family history as a retiree to hunting for a notorious serial killer—and how she became the nation’s leading authority on investigative genetic genealogy, the most dazzling new crime-fighting weapon to appear in decades.

On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead.

“I don’t have time to meditate!” Rebekah “Bex” Borucki has heard this a lot. A certified yoga and meditation teacher, she’s taught hundreds of thousands of people how to create simple yet powerful meditation practices. In fact, as she’ll show you in this book, in as little as four minutes, you can change your life. After years of suffering from anxiety and depression, both as a child and as an dult, Bex took control of her mental and physical health by establishing a rigorous fitness and yoga routine that quickly evolved into her own regular, homegrown four-minute daily meditation practice.

Before Adam Walsh there were no faces on milk cartons, no Amber Alerts, no National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, no federal databases of crimes against children, no pedophile registry. His 1981 abduction and murder, unsolved for over a quarter of a century, forever changed America.

On a sunny September day in 1931, Soviet spy Stanislav Shumovsky walked down the gangplank of the SS Europa and into New York, concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students. Joseph Stalin had sent him to acquire American secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the listener on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation, piecing together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives.