Books about Fumbling from Amazon.com

This hysterical collection of stories of actual crimes committed by clumsy crooks and fumbling felons will have you laughing out loud at painfully dumb attempts at crime. Illustrated.

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Price: $2.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ask consumers and users what names they associate with the multibillion dollar personal computer market, and they will answer IBM, Apple, Tandy, or Lotus. The more knowledgable of them will add the likes of Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, Compaq, and Borland But no one will say Xerox. Fifteen years after it invented personal computing, Xerox still means "copy."

Fumbling the Future tells how one of America's leading corporations invented the technology for one of the fastest-growing products of recent times, then miscalculated and mishandled the opportunity to fully exploit it. It is a classic story of how innovation can fare within large corporate structures, the real-life odyssey of what can happen to an idea as it travels from inspiration to implementation.

More than anything, Fumbling the Future is a tale of human beings whose talents, hopes, fears, habits, and prejudices determine the fate of our largest organizations and of our best ideas. In an era in which technological creativity and economic change are so critical to the competitiveness of the American economy, Fumbling the Future is a parable for our times.

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Price: $11.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the spirit of Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott, Kerry Egan describes her journey from grief to faith in this candid, spiritually profound account of her pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrim route through Northern Spain.

Kerry Egan, a student at Harvard Divinity School, became a pilgrim at the age of twenty-five, a year after the death of her father. Watching her father die had shattered the image of God Egan grew up with and undermined the theology she studied in school; she embarked on her pilgrimage full of hope and dread at the same time.

Fumbling is the moving journal of Egan’s experiences as she and her boyfriend traveled from the Pyrenees in southern France through the valleys of Navarra and westward through Spain to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, said to contain the remains of Saint James. The idea of pilgrimage rests on the belief that in some places the Divine is especially available to human beings and that the journey itself—the time spent as a pilgrim—is transformative, cleansing, and purifying. Egan was well versed in theories about grieving and the purpose of a pilgrimage, but it was through walking eight or ten hours a day that she first began to understand what grief really was and to recognize God’s presence in everyday people and places.

With humor and unabashed honesty, Egan records her struggles to deal with muddy roads, blistering heat, and grouchy moods. She describes fellow pilgrims of many nationalities, the humble abodes that provide them shelter, and the beautiful, often challenging, landscape. Each incident, encounter, and hard-won mile shapes her internal journey. The repetitiveness of walking frees her to meditate for long periods, the rhythm of her breathing awakens an awareness of the connections of breath, life, and God so central to the teachings of Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and the most unlikely events—from discovering chickens in church to the pleasure of having a pizza at a train station—remind her that prayer is as at once as simple and as profound as seeing and acknowledging the joys and beauty of life.

A story of overcoming anger and sadness and finding joy and redemption, Fumbling illuminates the power of grief to enhance our relationship with God.

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Price: $211.23 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Just as Mary Pierce had you rolling in the aisles with her thoughts about growing older in When Did I Stop Being Barbie and Become Mrs. Potato Head? this book will have you chuckling over her thoughts about life and faith—coming to faith, needing faith, growing in faith, and faltering in faith..
Price: $1.64 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Bestselling author Craig Hickman had had enough of the secrets and cover-ups and lies and was determined to solve the mystery of his roots. A brilliant and inspirational vision of love and spirituality, "Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures" chronicles his quest for his birth heritage and the aftermath in a one-of-a-kind, ambitious, and stunning new memoir. An estimated 7 million Americans are adopted. Depending on their age, many were adopted under the secrecy and shame of the closed adoption proceedings that ruled the day prior to the eighties. Unwanted pregnancies were covered up. Public and private agencies practically guaranteed young mothers and their families that they could go to their graves with their secrets intact. No one would ever find out who they were, least of all the children they were giving away. Adoptive parents got little, misleading, or no information about the circumstances surrounding their adopted child's birth. Imagine growing up and having to witness your doctor mark large black X's through your medical file under the family history section because you have no idea what conditions or diseases run in your bloodline. Imagine living most of your life without ever seeing anyone who looked like you. Imagine that when you are finally old enough to get some information about where you came from, your file resembles a classified FBI document littered with long black streaks that render your born identity anonymous. In this gripping and intimate memoir, Craig Hickman heeds the signs of his life and journeys into uncharted waters. After five years of searching, he shows up unannounced on his birth mother's doorstep. Craig's parents and sister aresupportive of his search, as is Job, the Dutchman with whom Craig has shared the last four years of his life. Jennifer, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, happy that her son has found her, attempts to allay her guilt and shame for giving him up and tries to make up for lost time. After all, she believes her son loves men because she abandoned him at birth. Borrowing from ancient oral traditions, the story is told primarily in the third person whereby the telling of the story becomes part of the story itself. Set primarily in Milwaukee and Boston--with stops in Atlanta, St. Louis, Alabama, Maine, Ohio, and Wyoming--and peopled with unforgettable characters, "Fumbling Toward Divinity" weaves together several compelling lives and relationships in an unputdownable read. From the opening pages to the poignant conclusion, Craig Hickman re-invents the memoir and proves himself a master storyteller. Part mystery, part history, part family saga, part divination--all of it true--"Fumbling Toward Divinity" bears witness to the transcendent power of spirit and love in an age of terror and madness. It delivers an emotional intensity that fiction - by comparison - can hope to achieve..
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Humor columnist Jared Fiel has collected the funniest stories from his first six years of parenthood into one book. He covers everything from the first ultrasound image (or was it the weather channel?) to his oldest son's first day of kindergarten. "Fumbling Thru Fatherhood" won first place in humor books in the 2005 EVVY Book Awards contest, sponsored by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA)..
Price: $11.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

It’s a long, strange journey to paradise, and often hilarious one, if you bravely follow the road less traveled—wherever it leads. John D. Spalding certainly has. In this smart and insightful collection, Spalding, Beliefnet com’s popular offbeat humorist, wanders America as a modern-day “pilgrim” seeking the Celestial City.

Loosely organizing his comic misadventures according to John Bunyan’s classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, Spalding describes how he spent three days as a street preacher in Times Square (“Excuse me, sir, did you know you’re going to hell?”); went to the mat (conversationally) with Omega and Apocalypse, two mainstays of the Christian Wrestling Federation; and visited a man who, practicing the art of trepanation, drilled a hole in his head to make himself permanently happy. He also experienced his own funeral, courtesy of the Dying-to-Get-In Company.

Like Christian, Bunyan’s beleaguered pilgrim, Spalding never knows who is waiting around the next bend. On his journey, he finds himself at the mercy of rebirthing therapists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormon missionaries, and in the company of a psychic “ghost counselor,” America’s luckiest (and perhaps divinely blessed) lottery winner, and a mysterious, barefoot holy man named Whatsyourname. Finally, he makes an ancient, five-hundred-mile pilgrimage across Spain, during which he learns what it truly means to be a pilgrim.

Funny, wry, and revealing, the stories in A Pilgrim’s Digress describe Spalding’s satirical quest for the righteous path and what he discovers about the spiritual zeitgeist along the way..
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Price: $11.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]