The result of over fifty years’ research, this book celebrates the 120th anniversary of the opening of Britain’s most successful tramway - the eight-mile Tramroad between Blackpool and Fleetwood. Opened in 1898, the line consistently paid a 6½% dividend before being bought by Blackpool Corporation in 1920, and is still running today as part of the resort’s world-famous tramway. Written by the foremost authority on Blackpool trams, the book is illustrated by over 240 black-and-white and colour photographs plus numerous maps and plans.

November Keys Inhabitant "If we had known, we would not have sold the club. I admit we succumbed to greed but we did not realise we were putting our heritage at such risk. They did take the team to great heights but the consequences were disastrous." American Gangster "They asked for what they got. Did they seriously think that we were interested in some run down hick football club?" November Keys Inhabitant "Our benevolent buyers turned out to be ruthless. We had never experienced a murder in our village before. Not unless you include Cheryl's cooking." American Gangster "What did you expect? They had something I wanted. Something life changing. Do you think I was going to get it by playing peek a boo?" November Keys Inhabitant "Although we celebrated Harvesting Leaf Day and talked about the creatures in the tree, we did not actually expect to see them." November Keys, a quaint village that was ready to sell its soul to the Devil for hastily promised riches. However, when the Devil buys he expects to collect. A very funny tale of greed, gangsters and things that go bump in the night.

A seasoned writer and teacher of memoir explores both the difficulties inherent in writing about personal trauma and the techniques for doing so in a compelling way. Since 2013, David Chrisinger has taught military veterans, their families, and other trauma survivors how to make sense of and recount their stories of loss and transformation. The lessons he imparts can be used by anyone who has ever experienced trauma, particularly people with a deep need to share that experience in a way that leads to connection and understanding. In Stories Are What Save Us, Chrisinger shows-through writing exercises, memoir excerpts, and lessons he's learned from his students-the most efficient ways to uncover and effectively communicate what you've learned while fighting your life's battles, whatever they may be. Chrisinger explores both the difficulties inherent in writing about personal trauma and the techniques for doing so in a compelling way. Weaving together his journey as a writer, editor, and teacher, he reveals his own deeply personal story of family trauma and abuse and explains how his life has informed his writing. Part craft guide, part memoir, and part teacher's handbook, Stories Are What Save Us presents readers with a wide range of craft tools and storytelling structures that Chrisinger and his students have used to process conflict in their own lives, creating beautiful stories of growth and transformation. Throughout, this profoundly moving, laser-focused book exemplifies the very lessons it strives to teach. A foreword by former soldier and memoirist Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country, and an afterword by military wife and memoirist Angela Ricketts, author of No Man's War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife, bookend the volume.

A riveting collection of thirty-eight narratives by American soldiers serving in Afghanistan, "Outside the Wire" offers a powerful evocation of everyday life in a war zone. Christine Dumaine Leche--a writing instructor who left her home and family to teach at Bagram Air Base and a forward operating base near the volatile Afghan-Pakistani border--encouraged these deeply personal reflections, which demonstrate the power of writing to battle the most traumatic of experiences.

The soldiers whose words fill this book often met for class with Leche under extreme circumstances and in challenging conditions, some having just returned from dangerous combat missions, others having spent the day in firefights, endured hours in the bitter cold of an open guard tower, or suffered a difficult phone conversation with a spouse back home. Some choose to record momentous events from childhood or civilian life--events that motivated them to join the military or that haunt them as adults. Others capture the immediacy of the battlefield and the emotional and psychological explosions that followed. These soldiers write through the senses and from the soul, grappling with the impact of moral complexity, fear, homesickness, boredom, and despair.

We each, writes Leche, require witnesses to the narratives of our lives. "Outside the Wire" creates that opportunity for us as readers to bear witness to the men and women who carry the weight of war for us all.

"The day of the first moonwalk, my father's college literature professor told his class, 'Someday they'll send a poet, and we'll find out what it's really like.' Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon--the war in Iraq--and deserves our thanks."--The New York Times Book Review, on Here, Bullet

In the aftermath of best-selling Here, Bullet, Brian Turner deftly illuminates existence as both easily extinguishable and ultimately enduring. These prophetic, osmotic poems wage a daily battle for normalcy, seeking structure in the quotidian while grappling with the absence of forgetting.

From "Discotheque":

Late at night, Jackowski and I taped the flex-chargeto the gate. I unspooled the shock tube, removed the safety.Hathaway radioed the countdown--and at zero--

I pulled the pin. It was me, Sgt. Turner, who cracked the night open with explosivesand wrote it all down, word by word.

Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving with the US Army as an infantry team leader in Iraq. He has been featured on National Public Radio, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and the BBC. He has received an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

Pliny's World offers readers a translation of the Natural History's opening books unprecedented for its completeness, accuracy and accessibility. Here, in quirky, often breathless style, Pliny lays the foundation of a hugely influential encyclopedia with coverage of the universe, stars, planets and moon, followed by earth's climate and then its physical and human geography. From Rome as ruling centerpoint, Pliny surveys the known world and its countless peoples in a vast arc from the Atlantic to Sri Lanka, embracing the Danube, Euphrates and Nile lands, Atlas and Caucasus mountains, Germany, Africa, Arabia, India. Passages from later books further illustrating his geographical grasp are appended, on topics as varied as wine, water, trees, birds and fish. Throughout, Pliny's frank expression of strong opinions about religion, distorted human values, abuse of the environment (and more) reveals uncannily modern preoccupations. His work remained an inspirational resource through the Renaissance, and still fascinates today.

From Sioux Falls to Khartoum, from Kyoto to Darwin; from the panchayat forests to the Giant's Causeway; in taxis and at bus stops, in kitchens and sleigh beds, haystacks and airports-people are kissing one another. The sublime kiss. The ambiguous kiss. The broken kiss. The kiss that changes a life. Far from the scripted passion of Hollywood, this uniquely human gesture carries within it the possibility for infinite shades of meaning and it does not stop for anything-not war, revolution or natural disaster. In The Kiss, authors like Nick Flynn, Kristen Radtke and Pico Iyer explore our quest to bridge the gulf between ourselves and others through this fleeting physical connection, and to uncover the depths contained in words like tenderness, passion and love.

An award-winning poet and former infantry team leader in Iraq, Brian Turner combines his devastating recollections as "Sergeant Turner" with his visions of the experiences of generations of warriors in his family-and even those of the enemy-in a work of profound understanding and shocking beauty.

Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa ("Dien Cai Dau"), Bruce Weigl ("Song of Napalm") and Alice James' own Doug Anderson ("The Moon Reflected Fire"), Iraqi war veteran Brian Turner writes power-fully affecting poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty, and skill. Based on Turner's yearlong tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader, the poems offer gracefully rendered, unflinching description but, remarkably, leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. "Here, Bullet" is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.

"Here, Bullet"

"If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, that leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you've started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time."

Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning in November 2003 with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999 with the 10th Mountain Division. His poetry has been published in "Poetry Daily," "The Georgia Review," and other journals, and in the "Voices in Wartime Anthology" published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name.

From Sioux Falls to Khartoum, from Kyoto to Darwin; from the panchayat forests to the Giant's Causeway; in taxis and at bus stops, in kitchens and sleigh beds, haystacks and airports-people are kissing one another. The sublime kiss. The ambiguous kiss. The broken kiss. The kiss that changes a life. Far from the scripted passion of Hollywood, this uniquely human gesture carries within it the possibility for infinite shades of meaning and it does not stop for anything-not war, revolution or natural disaster. In The Kiss, authors like Nick Flynn, Kristen Radtke and Pico Iyer explore our quest to bridge the gulf between ourselves and others through this fleeting physical connection, and to uncover the depths contained in words like tenderness, passion and love.

Brian Turner's first book of poems, Here, Bullet, was a harrowing, first-hand account of the Iraq War by a soldier-poet. In Phantom Noise he pumps up the volume as he faces and tries to deal with the traumatic aftermath of war. Flashbacks explode the daily hell of Baghdad into the streets and malls of peaceful California, at the same time sending Turner's imagination reeling back to Iraq. If he thought he had written all he could of his Iraq experiences in "Here, Bullet", he was mistaken, for what he saw and felt there affected him so profoundly that more poems had to be written, years later, from a place of apparent safety. Brian Turner writes a powerful poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill. Like Keith Douglas's poems from the North African desert in the Second World War, Turner's testament from the war in Iraq offers unflinchingly accurate description but no moral judgement, leaving the reader to draw any conclusions. Repetitive media reports show little of people's daily experience of the war and occupation. In "Phantom Noise", as in "Here, Bullet", we see and feel the devastatingly surreal reality of everyday life and death for soldiers and civilians through the eyes of an eloquent writer who served in the US Army for seven years, with a year's tour of duty in Iraq as an infantry team leader. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

November Keys Inhabitant "If we had known, we would not have sold the club. I admit we succumbed to greed but we did not realise we were putting our heritage at such risk. They did take the team to great heights but the consequences were disastrous." American Gangster "They asked for what they got. Did they seriously think that we were interested in some run down hick football club?" November Keys Inhabitant "Our benevolent buyers turned out to be ruthless. We had never experienced a murder in our village before. Not unless you include Cheryl's cooking." American Gangster "What did you expect? They had something I wanted. Something life changing. Do you think I was going to get it by playing peek a boo?" November Keys Inhabitant "Although we celebrated Harvesting Leaf Day and talked about the creatures in the tree, we did not actually expect to see them." November Keys, a quaint village that was ready to sell its soul to the Devil for hastily promised riches. However, when the Devil buys he expects to collect. A very funny tale of greed, gangsters and things that go bump in the night.

Fundraising for Volunteers takes you on a journey through the maze of fundraising concepts, processes, and activities in a simple and easy-to-follow manner. It provides readers with all the skills you will need to select a fundraising event and put into place the planning required to make it highly successful.

The book deals with the topic in three sections: The Committee, The One Secret Key, and The Event.

Section One helps with one of the most difficult aspects of fundraising: how to manage and run a fundraising committee. It talks about how to handle many of the common difficulties that arise when working with committees.

Section Two illuminates a simple and easy-to-implement key to fundraising. There is only one key, and once you know what it is, making money from fundraising will always be assured.

Section Three includes an extensive list of fundraising events from which to choose your next event. The events are categorized and classified, which makes choosing an appropriate event for your group very easy.

This book is a must read before you hold your next fundraising activity.