This utterly authentic and exciting memoir is presented without embellishment. Between 1971 and 1974, English born Julian Hamer traveled for three years in West Africa, catching and exporting reptiles and amphibians back to Europe. This involved living in the bush sometimes far from civilization and for months at a time. During the course of these extraordinary adventures, he and his colleague, Karl Bishop, an Austrian, experienced Africa at a time when many new countries had only recently come into being after a long colonial history. The cultures of the many peoples as well as the fauna are beautifully and intimately described through a direct experience of life in the bush lived as the rural Africans themselves experienced it.

In Historic Columbus Crimes, the father-daughter team of David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker looks back at sixteen tales of murder, mystery and mayhem culled from city history. Take the rock star slain by a troubled fan or the drag queen slashed to death by a would-be ninja. Then there's the writer who died acting out the plot of his next book, the minister's wife incinerated in the parsonage furnace and a couple of serial killers who outdid the Son of Sam. Not to mention a gunfight at Broad and High, grave-robbing medical students, the bloodiest day in FBI history and other fascinating stories of crime and tragedy. They're all here, and they're all true

"Turning Tuscan" is a story about what it's like to fall in love with Tuscany in your mid-life years, to buy a home there, to change around your work, and, finally, to leave the San Francisco Bay Area and move with your wife and children to a tiny Tuscan village. That's the first part. The second part tries to share what it's like living here once you've made the move: learning the language, becoming part of a village community, running a tour company, understanding the political scene, getting an internet connection, enjoying Renaissance art, spending time in the hospital, appreciating the bureaucracy, and enduring customer service at The Phone Company. It has been written in a way that will make you feel like an honored guest invited into the cockpit as we transfer from America to Tuscany and set up shop. And, in case you are wondering what kind of crazy person does such a thing, and whether you might be one, I try to share enough personal history and detail about our lives on both sides of the ocean to satisfy your curiosity. As a foreigner who enters into another culture, there is a limited window of time available to you to see these things and to try to record them in some way. You have to become Italian enough to play the game, but not so Italian yet that it all becomes invisible. If you wait too long, you are no longer in a position to reflect or comment on cultural differences because what people are doing seems totally normal to you. Ripeness is all, as the poet said, and hopefully I've managed to capture for you some of the subtler aspects of living here that travel photos, even high resolution ones, can never reveal.