Traffic & Safety

Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope

Meet Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerak: one buried under the wrong name, one in a coma and being cared for by the wrong family.

This shocking case of mistaken identity stunned the country and made national news. Would it destroy a family? Shatter their faith? Push two families into bitterness, resentment, and guilt?

Read this unprecedented story of two traumatized families who describe their ordeal and explore the bond sustaining and uniting them as they deal with their bizarre reversal of life lost and life found.

And join Whitney Cerak, the sole surviving student, as she comes to terms with her new identity, forever altered, yet on the brink of new beginnings.

Mistaken Identity weaves a complex tale of honesty, vulnerability, loss, hope, faith, and love in the face of one of the strangest twists of circumstances imaginable.

Crash Course: A Self-Healing Guide to Auto Accident Trauma and Recovery

Trauma following automobile accidents can persist for weeks, months, or longer. Symptoms include nervousness, sleep disorders, loss of appetite, and sexual dysfunction. In Crash Course, Diane Poole Heller and Laurence Heller take readers through a series of case histories and exercises to explain and treat the health problems and trauma brought on by car accidents.

Ride Hard, Ride Smart: Ultimate Street Strategies for Advanced Motorcyclists

The Bodyguard's Story: Diana, the Crash, and the Sole Survivor

"Where were you when Diana died?

For Trevor Rees-Jones, the answer is simple: he was in the same hospital as Diana, fighting for his own life a few rooms away. As bodyguard to her companion Dodi Fayed, he was with the couple when, hounded by paparazzi, and with a driver who turned out to be drunk, their Mercedes crashed into the thirteenth pillar of the tunnel under the Place de l'Alma in Paris. Dodi and the Driver, Henri Paul, died instantaneously, medics say; Diana was rushed to a nearby hospital where doctors worked feverishly to resuscitate her before giving up in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Miraculously, Trevor survived. But his condition was critical--internal chest injuries and a broken wrist were the least of it. His head had taken the brunt of the impact and suffered catastrophic damage; his face was crushed beyond recognition. In a stunning medical drama, however, a facial surgeon performed a miracle of reconstruction, and--along with Trevor's own indomitable will and the support of his family and friends--the bodyguard was able to leave the hospital after just over a month. His goal then was straightforward: to return to a normal life as soon as possible, go back to work for his employer, Mohamed Al Fayed, and to the simple pleasures of rugby and his mates at home in Shropshire.

But the crash that nearly killed him had killed Diana, Princess of Wales, one of the most famous women of the late twentieth century. A normal life was no longer an option. An as Mohamed Al Fayed's grief at the loss of his son quickly turned into a desperate hunt for reasons, for culprits and conspiracy, Trevor found his unswerving loyalty to the Boss at first questioned and then, ultimately, destroyed, as Fayed pointed the finger of blame at him.

The Bodyguard's Story grippingly describes, for the first time, Trevor Rees-Jones's part in these astonishing events. From the prelude to Paris, when Trevor found himself minding the Princess and her two sons in the south of France, to the crash itself and its causes and consequences, this book reveals the true, first-hand account of one of the most sensational news stories of the last century. Compelling, alarming and yet deeply moving, it is a remarkable story of courage under fire, and of how ordinary people can react to extraordinary circumstances and survive, scarred, but with their souls and values intact."

Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue

As the first decade of the new century was getting underway, Spalding Gray worried that the joy he’d finally found with his wife, stepdaughter, and two sons would fail to fuel his work as a theatrical monologist the way anxiety, conflict, doubt, and various crises once had. Before he got the chance to find out, however, an automobile accident in Ireland left him with the lasting wounds of body and spirit that ultimately led him to take his own life. But as his dear friend novelist Francine Prose notes in this volume’s foreword, “Even when his depression became so severe that he was barely able to hold a simple conversation, he was, miraculously, able to perform.”

As was always his method, Gray began to fashion a new monologue in various workshop settings that would tell the story of the accident and its aftermath. Originally titled Black Spot—for what the locals called the section of highway where Gray’s accident occurred—it began as a series of workshops at P.S. 122 in New York City and eventually became Life Interrupted.Gray died in early 2004, and though never completed, Life Interrupted is rich with brave self-revelation, masterfully acute observations of wonderfully peculiar people, penetrating wit and genuine humor, an irresolvable fascination with life and death, and all the other attributes of Gray’s singular and unmistakable voice.

In the final performance of Life Interrupted, Gray read two additional pieces: a short story about a day he spent with his son Theo at the carousel in Central Park and a brief, poignant love letter to New York City that he wrote after the terrorist attacks in 2001. This volume includes these pieces as well as many of the eulogies that were delivered by his friends and family at memorial services held at Lincoln Center and in Sag Harbor.




[If you had to reduce all of Spalding’s work to its essence, its core, if you wanted to locate the subject to which, no matter what else he talked about, he kept returning, I suppose you could say that his work was a profoundly metaphysical inquiry into how we manage to live despite the knowledge that we are someday going to die. . . .

If there is a consolation, it’s what he left behind: the children whom he so loved and, of course, his work. Reading the unfinished pieces in this volume . . . we hear his voice again and feel the happiness we felt when he sat on stage behind his wooden desk, took a sip from his water glass, transformed the raw material of his life into art, and the crowd applauded each brilliant, beautiful sentence.] —Francine Prose, from the Foreword



Also available as an eBook

Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-up

An achievement of reportorial diligence, this book tells a story that the most imaginative crime novelist would have been hard put to invent. -- People

A Picture History of the Brooklyn Bridge

Divorce Your Car! : Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile

Alvord's perceptive gloss of the late, great, 20th century's pitiful auto intoxication is a fascinating read and a stunning contradiction of the fatuity that technology is neutral. Her gathering of stories illuminates the existence of a vital planet-wide, counter-car-culture. Witty, substantial and penetrating, Divorce Your Car! is a mighty persuasive job of work.?Stephanie Mills, from the Foreword

Our romance with cars, begun with enthusiasm more than 100 years ago, has in fact become a very troubled entanglement. Today's relationship with the automobile inflicts upon us pollution, noise, congestion, sprawl, big expenses, injury, and even death. Yet we continue to live with cars at a growing cost to ourselves and the environment.
What can people do about this souring affair? Divorce your car! Re-meet your feet, board a bike, take a train, pull out of this dysfunctional relationship with the automobile! Divorcing your car can take many forms, from simply using it less to not owning one at all. This practical guide shows how divorcing a car can be fun, healthy, money-saving, and helpful to the planet in the process.
Most other transportation reform books emphasize long-range political and economic policy. Divorce Your Car! speaks less about policy and more about realistic actions that individuals can take now to reduce their car-dependence. It encourages readers to change their own driving behavior without waiting for broader social change, stressing that individual action can drive social change.
Car-dependency is a serious problem, but Divorce Your Car! is leavened with love-affair and self-help analogies in the text as well as cartoon illustrations. From commuters crazed by congestion and soccer moms sick of chauffeuring, to environmentalists looking for auto alternatives?Divorce Your Car! provides all the reasons not to drive and the many alternative ways we can all get around without our cars.

Table of Contents

Introduction
PART 1: LOVE'S BEEN BLIND: HOW WE ENDED UP MARRIED TO CARS
1: Falling Head Over Wheels: The Advent of Cars
2: Other Suitors Drop by the Wayside: The Decline of Non-Car Transport
3: The Possessive Auto Takes Over the Lands

The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America

"With his lively pen and lyric camera, Mr. Hokanson takes us on a journey of discovery. The open road is, in part, a defining characteristic of this country, and the Lincoln Highway is one of the historic traces ... like the Oregon Trail, the Camino Real, or the National Road. Not just for tourists, the Lincoln Highway accelerated the processes of social mobility, changed our geography, and led inexorably to a new America. This is an important story, well researched and beautifully, perceptively told." -- William L. Withuhn, Curator of Transportation, Smithsonian Institution

Ever After: A Father's True Story

From the powerful author of Birdy, Dad, and A Midnight Clear, the acclaimed memoir about a family's tragedy, recovery, and spiritual renewal. It is the true story of the events that changed Wharton's life and gave him a belief in an afterlife--the story of the tragedy that killed his 36-year-old daughter and her family in a highway collision, told amazingly from his daughter Kate's point of view, as well as his own.