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She was the sexiest thing in a hard hat that architect Cody Johnson had ever seen, but structural engineer Abra Wilson also had a will as strong as a steel girder - and just about as flexible. But Cody had plans for Abra that not even this spirited beauty could resist...


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<p class="description">Cynical Senator Alan MacGregor falls for free-spirited beauty Shelby Campbell despite their long-standing family feud.</p>


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Love blooms in the second novel in Nora Roberts's celebrated Bride Quartet series. As little girls MacKensie, Emma, Laurel, and Parker spent hours acting out their perfect make believe "I do" moments. Years later their fantasies become reality when they start their own wedding planning company to make every woman's dream day come true. With perfect flowers, delicious desserts, and joyful moments captured on film, Nora Roberts's Bride Quartet shares each woman's emotionally magical journey to romance.  In Bed of Roses, florist Emma Grant is finding career success with her friends at Vows wedding planning company, and her love life appears to be thriving. Though men swarm around her, she still hasn't found Mr. Right. And the last place she's looking is right under her nose.  But that's just where Jack Cooke is. He's so close to the women of Vows that he's practically family, but the architect has begun to admit to himself that his feelings for Emma have developed into much more than friendship. When Emma returns his passion-kiss for blistering kiss-they must trust in their history...and in their hearts.


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Multi-New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts has dazzled millions of readers with her riveting stories of mystery and romance.  THE CALHOUN WOMEN celebrates that intriguing blend. It's the stuff that love -- and legends -- are made of.Efficient Amanda Calhoun finds easygoing Sloan O'Riley insufferable -- and irresistible.  As she finalizes all the arrangements for her sister C.C.'s storybook wedding to hotel magnate Trenton St. James, and plans for the day she assumes command of The Towers Retreat, her family is racing to solve the generations-old mystery surrounding a priceless hidden emerald necklace.


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<p class="description">Nora Ephron returns with her first book since the astounding success of I Feel Bad About My Neck, taking a cold, hard, hilarious look at the past, the present, and the future, bemoaning the vicissitudes of modern life, and recalling with her signature clarity and wisdom everything she hasn’t (yet) forgotten.Even as she’s listing “What I Won’t Miss” and “What I Will Miss”—making the final tally—Ephron reaches back to recount falling hard for a way of life (“Journalism: A Love Story”) and breaking up even harder with the men in her life (“The D Word”), a long- anticipated inheritance with entirely unanticipated results (“My Life as an Heiress”), and the evolution, a decade after she wrote and directed You’ve Got Mail, of her relationship with her in-box (“The Six Stages of E- mail”). All the while, she gives candid, charming voice to everything women who have reached a certain age have been thinking . . . but have rarely acknowledged.Filled with insights and observations that instantly ring true—and could have come only from Nora Ephron—I Remember Nothing is a pure delight.</p>


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<div><p>Julia Child became a household name when she entered the lives of millions of Americans through our hearts and kitchens. Yet few know the richly varied private life that lies behind this icon, whose statuesque height and warmly enthused warble have become synonymous with the art of cooking. </p><p>In this biography we meet the earthy and outrageous Julia, who, at age eighty-five, remains a complex role model. Fitch, who had access to all of Julia's private letters and diaries, takes us through her life, from her exuberant youth as a high-spirited California girl to her years at Smith College, where she was at the center of every prank and party. When most of her girlfriends married, Julia volunteered with the OSS in India and China during World War II, and was an integral part of this elite corps. There she met her future husband, the cosmopolitan Paul Child, who introduced her to the glories of art, fine French cuisine, and love. Theirs was a deeply passionate romance and a modern marriage of equals.</p><p>Julia began her culinary training only at the age of thirty-seven at the Cordon Bleu. Later she roamed the food markets of Marseilles, Bonn, and Oslo. She invested ten years of learning and experimentation in what would become her first bestselling classic, <strong>Mastering the Art of French Cooking</strong>. Now, her career is legend, spanning nearly forty years and still going strong. Generations love the humor and trademark aplomb that have made Julia a household name. Resisting fads and narrow, fanatical conventions of health-consciousness, Julia is the quintessential teacher. The perfect gift for food lovers and a romantic biography of a woman modern before her time, this is a truly American life.</p></div>


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<div><p>Thousands of things you didn't think you needed to know-and probably don't. </p><p>All you never needed to know, and couldn't be bothered to ask.</p><p>One person's useless information could prove invaluable to someone else. Then again, maybe not. But to The Useless Information Society, any fact that passes its gasp-inducing, "not-a-lot-of-people-know- that" test merits inclusion in this fascinating but ultimately useless book.</p><p>Did you know...<br>- That fish scales are used to make lipstick?<br>- Why organized crime accounts for ten percent of the United States's annual income?<br>- The name of the first CD pressed in the U.S.?<br>- The shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar?<br>- How much Elvis weighed at the time of his death?<br>- What the suits in a deck of cards represent?<br>- How many Quarter Pounders can be made from one cow?<br>- How interesting useless information can be?</p><p><em>The Book of Useless Information</em> answers these teasers and will captivate readers with the joy of pursuing pointless knowledge.</p></div>


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<p class="description">Small changes can make a big difference in your powers of persuasionWhat one word can you start using today to increase your persuasiveness by more than fifty percent?Which item of stationery can dramatically increase people's responses to your requests? How can you win over your rivals by inconveniencing them? Why does knowing that so many dentists are named Dennis improve your persuasive prowess? Every day we face the challenge of persuading others to do what we want. But what makes people say yes to our requests? Persuasion is not only an art, it is also a science, and researchers who study it have uncovered a series of hidden rules for moving people in your direction. Based on more than sixty years of research into the psychology of persuasion, Yes! reveals fifty simple but remarkably effective strategies that will make you much more persuasive at work and in your personal life, too.Cowritten by the world's most quoted expert on influence, Professor Robert Cialdini, Yes! presents dozens of surprising discoveries from the science of persuasion in short, enjoyable, and insightful chapters that you can apply immediately to become a more effective persuader. Why did a sign pointing out the problem of vandalism in the Petrified Forest National Park actually increase the theft of pieces of petrified wood? Why did sales of jam multiply tenfold when consumers were offered many fewer flavors? Why did people prefer a Mercedes immediately after giving reasons why they prefer a BMW? What simple message on cards left in hotel rooms greatly increased the number of people who behaved in environmentally friendly ways? Often counterintuitive, the findings presented in Yes! will steer you away from common pitfalls while empowering you with little known but proven wisdom.Whether you are in advertising, marketing, management, on sales, or just curious about how to be more influential in everyday life, Yes! shows how making small, scientifically proven changes to your approach can have a dramatic effect on your persuasive powers.</p>


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<p class="description">People are dying . . . Each victim has been a thorn in the side of the FBI, and, inexplicably, domestic terrorists who claim to be anti-Bureau are claiming responsibility—and threatening more murders if their huge financial demands aren't met.   The trap has been set. The Bureau's best agents attempt to follow the detailed demands of the blackmailers, only to be drawn into intricate mazes which are ingeniously riddled with hazards, ensuring that no one will emerge alive. The FBI has used every technological secret at their disposal to beat the killers at their game—and they have failed.   The clock is ticking. Deputy Assistant Director Kate Bannon knows that the solution will not be found by following the rules. It's time to call in someone from her past, someone who has routinely handled the impossible—a loose cannon ex-agent fired for insubordination but still the very best she has ever seen.   It's time to call in Steve Vail . . . The Bricklayer.</p>


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One day in early spring, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. She is promised a nicely furnished apartment inside the Unit, where she will make new friends, enjoy the state of the art recreation facilities, and live the few remaining days of her life in comfort with people who are just like her. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty–single, childless, and without jobs in progressive industries–are sequestered for their final few years; they are considered outsiders. In the Unit they are expected to contribute themselves for drug and psychological testing, and ultimately donate their organs, little by little, until the final donation. Despite the ruthless nature of this practice, the ethos of this near-future society and the Unit is to take care of others, and Dorrit finds herself living under very pleasant conditions: well-housed, well-fed, and well-attended. She is resigned to her fate and discovers her days there to be rather consoling and peaceful. But when she meets a man inside the Unit and falls in love, the extraordinary becomes a reality and life suddenly turns unbearable. Dorrit is faced with compliance or escape, and…well, then what?THE UNIT is a gripping exploration of a society in the throes of an experiment, in which the “dispensable” ones are convinced under gentle coercion of the importance of sacrificing for the “necessary” ones. Ninni Holmqvist has created a debut novel of humor, sorrow, and rage about love, the close bonds of friendship, and about a cynical, utilitarian way of thinking disguised as care.


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">When Sankovitch lost her older sister to cancer, she was determined to "live her life double" in order to make up for her family's painful loss. But after three years spent at a frenetic pace, Sankovitch decided to slow down and rediscover the pleasure of books in order to reconnect with the memory of her sister. Despite the day-to-day responsibilities of raising four sons—and the holidays, vacations, and sudden illnesses that accompany a large family—Sankovitch vowed to read one book a day for an entire year and blog about it. In this entertaining bibliophile's dream, Sankovitch (who launched ReadAllDay.org and was profiled in the New York Times) found that her "year of magical reading" was "not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it." As well as being an homage to her sister and their family of readers, Sankovitch's memoir speaks to the power that books can have over our daily lives. Sankovitch champions the act of reading not as an indulgence but as a necessity, and will make the perfect gift from one bookworm to another. </span></h3></div>


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An arresting story about starting over after a friend's suicide, froma breakthrough new voice in YA fiction dear caitlin, there are so many things that i want so badly to tell you but i just can't. Devastating, hopeful, hopeless, playful . . . in words and illustrations, Ingrid left behind a painful farewell in her journal for Caitlin. Now Caitlin is left alone, by loss and by choice, struggling to find renewed hope in the wake of her best friend's suicide. With the help of family and newfound friends, Caitlin will encounter first love, broaden her horizons, and start to realize that true friendship didn't die with Ingrid. And the journal which once seemed only to chronicle Ingrid's descent into depression, becomes the tool by which Caitlin once again reaches out to all those who loved Ingrid - and Caitlin herself


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<div><p>MTV’s original VJs offer a behind-the-scenes oral history of the early years of MTV, 1981 to 1987, when it was exploding, reshaping the culture, and creating “the MTV generation.”</p><p>Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, and Martha Quinn (along with the late J. J. Jackson) had front-row seats to a cultural revolution—and the hijinks of music stars like Adam Ant, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, and Duran Duran. Their worlds collided, of course: John Cougar invited Nina to a late-night “party” that proved to be a seduction attempt. Mark partied with David Lee Roth, who offered him cocaine and groupies. Aretha Franklin made chili for Alan. Bob Dylan whisked Martha off to Ireland in his private jet. </p><p>But while <em>VJ </em>has plenty of dish—secret romances, nude photographs, incoherent celebrities—it also reveals how four VJs grew up alongside MTV’s devoted viewers and became that generation’s trusted narrators. They tell the story of the ’80s, from the neon-colored drawstring pants to the Reagan administration, and offer a deeper understanding of how MTV changed our culture. Or as the VJs put it: “We’re the reason you have no attention span.”</p></div>


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In one of the most unique memoirs of addiction ever published, Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx shares mesmerizing diary entries from the year he spiraled out of control in a haze of heroin and cocaine, presented alongside riveting commentary from people who were there at the time, and from Nikki himself.When Mötley Crüe was at the height of its fame, there wasn't any drug Nikki Sixx wouldn't do. He spent days -- sometimes alone, sometimes with other addicts, friends, and lovers -- in a coke and heroin-fueled daze. The highs were high, and Nikki's journal entries reveal some euphoria and joy. But the lows were lower, often ending with Nikki in his closet, surrounded by drug paraphernalia and wrapped in paranoid delusions.Here, Nikki shares those diary entries -- some poetic, some scatterbrained, some bizarre -- and reflects on that time. Joining him are Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Bob Rock, and a host of ex-managers, ex-lovers, and more.Brutally honest, utterly riveting, and shockingly moving, The Heroin Diaries follows Nikki during the year he plunged to rock bottom -- and his courageous decision to pick himself up and start living again.


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<p class="description">William Golding's classic tale about a group of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island is just as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954. At first, the stranded boys cooperate, attempting to gather food, make shelters, and maintain signal fires. Overseeing their efforts are Ralph, "the boy with fair hair," and Piggy, Ralph's chubby, wisdom-dispensing sidekick whose thick spectacles come in handy for lighting fires. Although Ralph tries to impose order and delegate responsibility, there are many in their number who would rather swim, play, or hunt the island's wild pig population. Soon Ralph's rules are being ignored or challenged outright. His fiercest antagonist is Jack, the redheaded leader of the pig hunters, who manages to lure away many of the boys to join his band of painted savages. The situation deteriorates as the trappings of civilization continue to fall away, until Ralph discovers that instead of being hunters, he and Piggy have become the hunted: "He forgot his words, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear on flying feet." Golding's gripping novel explores the boundary between human reason and animal instinct, all on the brutal playing field of adolescent competition.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">A spoiled brat finds her backbone when fate kicks her to the curb in tabloid staple Richie's decent follow-up to The Truth About Diamonds. Charlotte Williams goes from pampered princess to outcast after her adored father pleads guilty to a massive Wall Street fraud. To escape the wrath of cheated investors, an Internet smear campaign, and a creepy stalker, Charlotte heads to the New Orleans home of Millie, her beloved former nanny and the only mom she's known. What Charlotte finds, however, is far more than a safe harbor: a best friend in fashion maven Kat (their friendship may give readers Simple Life flashbacks); a handsome love interest in Millie's musician son, Jackson; and a chance to unleash the sensational singing voice inherited from a mom she only knows from a heartbreaking home movie. Richie, no stranger to celebrity and tabloid gossip, proves she's been there/done that in this celeb-savvy and disarmingly charming defense of the power of love and good genes. </span></h3></div>


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<p class="description">In her satisfying, sensual third novel, Nicole Mones takes readers inside the hidden world of elite cuisine in modern China through the story of an American food writer in Beijing. When recently widowed Maggie McElroy is called to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate, she is blindsided by the discovery that he may have led a double life. Since work is all that will keep her sane, her magazine editor assigns her to profile Sam, a half-Chinese American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the imperial palace. As she watches Sam gear up for China’s Olympic culinary competition by planning the banquet of a lifetime, she begins to see past the cuisine’s artistry to glimpse its coherent expression of Chinese civilization. It is here, amid lessons of tradition, obligation, and human connection that she finds the secret ingredient that may yet heal her heart.</p>


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A novel of searing intelligence and startling originality, Lost in Translation heralds the debut of a unique new voice on the literary landscape.  Nicole Mones creates an unforgettable story of love and desire, of family ties and human conflict, and of one woman's struggle to lose herself in a foreign land--only to discover her home, her heart, herself.At dawn in Beijing, Alice Mannegan pedals a bicycle through the deserted streets.  An American by birth, a translator by profession, she spends her nights in Beijing's smoke-filled bars, and the Chinese men she so desires never misunderstand her intentions.  All around her rushes the air of China, the scent of history and change, of a world where she has come to escape her father's love and her own pain.  It is a world in which, each night as she slips from her hotel, she hopes to lose herself forever.For Alice, it began with a phone call from an American archaeologist seeking a translator.  And it ended in an intoxicating journey of the heart--one that would plunge her into a nation's past, and into some of the most rarely glimpsed regions of China.  Hired by an archaeologist searching for the bones of Peking Man, Alice joins an expedition that penetrates a vast, uncharted land and brings Professor Lin Shiyang into her life.  As they draw closer to unearthing the secret of Peking Man, as the group's every move is followed, their every whisper recorded, Alice and Lin find shelter in each other, slowly putting to rest the ghosts of their pasts.  What happens between them becomes one of the most breathtakingly erotic love stories in recent fiction.  Indeed, Lost in Translation is a novel about love--between a nation and its past, between a man and a memory, between a father and a daughter.  Its powerful impact confirms the extraordinary gifts of a master storyteller, Nicole Mones.


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<p>For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. </p><p>Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of <strong>Great House</strong> make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared. </p><p><strong>Great House</strong> is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?</p><p>Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. </p>


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<p class="description">Do I have a child? Julia DeSmit knew she would face the question eventually, but she didn’t expect it now. At twenty-four, she is finally content with the way her life has unfolded. A single mother to her son and young brother, she works at the local grocery store while chipping away at a two-year degree. All her free time is spent with her unorthodox family—her boys, her grandmother, and her boyfriend of five years. It’s not perfect, but Julia is happier than ever. So when she receives the cryptic e-mail from her son’s father, Julia’s world is turned upside down. She hasn’t heard from Parker since he left her in a college parking lot nearly six years ago. But one look at her son—the spitting image of his father—is enough to convince her that, for better or worse, Parker is a part of their story. Faced with this new reality and an unexpected tragedy, Julia begins a tightrope walk between what was and what is, what she hopes for and what will be.</p>


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<p>Nobody knows Switzerland like our resident European authors. Whether it's walking through spectacular Alpine valleys, dining at the cosmopolitan Swiss table or relaxing in an eco-friendly spa, this 6th edition will tell you how to go about it at the right price.<p>Lonely Planet guides are written by experts who get to the heart of every destination they visit. This fully updated edition is packed with accurate, practical and honest advice, designed to give you the information you need to make the most of your trip.<p><B>In This Guide:</B><p>Complete coverage of walking and trekking in a dedicated Walking in Switzerland chapter<p>Value recommendations help make your money go further<p>Unique Green Index helps you pick out the top sustainable options


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<p>Discover why the Eiffel Tower expands during Paris' high season<p>Tour the wild beaches and gin-clear waters of Corsica's Bouches de Bonifacio<p>Pick up a bottle of locally made cider along Normandy's Route de Cidre<p>Get an Alpine adrenaline rush heli-skiing above Chamonix<p><B>In This Guide:</B><p>Seven authors, 195 days of research, 157 maps, 105 glasses of wine<p>New color food chapter detailing regional specialties and country-wide staples<p>Interviews with a perfumer in Grasse, a Michelin star-awarded Lyonnais chef and a paraglider<p>Content updated daily - visit <B><I>lonelyplanet.com</I></B> for up-to-the-minute reviews, updates and traveler insights


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"I loved Swimming. It's the most original novel I've read all year. I can't get Pip's voice out of my mind. Give yourself a treat this summer- read this book." -Judy Blume A spectacular debut about the rise of an Olympic champion-a novel about competition, obsession, the hunger for victory, and a young girl with an unsinkable spirit struggling to stay afloat in the only way she can. When we first meet Pip, the extraordinary heroine of Nicola Keegan's first novel, she is landlocked in a small town in the center of Kansas, literally swimming for her life. Pip is tall and flat and smart and funny and supernaturally buoyant. On land, she has her share of troubles: an agoraphobic mother, a lost father, a drug-addled sister, and a Catholic education dominated by a group of high-energy nuns. But in the water, Pip is unstoppable. In the water, her suffering and rage are transmuted into grace and speed and beauty. Swimming is the story of Pip's journey from a small Midwestern swim team to her first state meet, her brutal professional training, and the final, record-breaking swims that lead to her dizzying ascent to the Olympic podium in Barcelona. It's the story of a girl who discovers, in the loneliness of adolescence, in the family tragedies that threaten to engulf her, the resilience of the human spirit and the spectacular power of her own body. A ferociously original novel, sparkling with wit and blazing with emotion, from a gifted new novelist.


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A book guaranteed to touch anyone who has ever had a beloved pet…     From instant New York Times bestseller, Dr. Nick Trout comes another touching and heartfelt story from the front lines of veterinary medicine—the story of two dogs who forever changed the way he thought about life, death, fate and love.   Helen is an older cocker spaniel found neglected and abandoned in a restaurant parking lot one rainy night.  Despite her mangy condition and terrible smell, Ben and Eileen fall in love with the pitiful creature and decide to take her in.  But just as Helen is rescued from a sad life on the streets and enveloped in a loving home with all the creature comforts an old dog could ask for, a tumor is discovered and she's given a devastating prognosis.  All Ben and Eileen want is for Helen to beat the odds and survive for one more summer so that she can have one chance to swim in the ocean on the family's annual trip to Prince Edward Island.  In short, they want a miracle.   Meanwhile, fourteen-month-old miniature pinscher Cleo keeps breaking one leg after another which devastates her poor owner, Sandi.  While Cleo is visiting Sandi's daughter, Sonja, in Bermuda, she succumbs to yet another fracture.  Distraught that the injury happened on her watch, Sonja makes a plan to fly Cleo to Boston to get the specialist care she needs before Sandi even finds out.  Enter Dr. Trout who presides over what should be a fairly routine surgery.   What happens next forever links two families, their dogs and a beloved veterinarian and teaches them all a lesson about grace that resonates to this day.    Love is the Best Medicine immerses you in the true life drama of beloved pets whose lives hang in the balance.  Every page underscores the profound bond we have with the animals in our lives and the incredible responsibility Nick carries as their healer.  Certainly Dr. Trout has an impressive array of fancy equipment, training and skills at his disposable, but his most important tool (as he persuasively illustrates here) is a fundamental belief in the power of hope, humility, and grace.     Wry, charming, and intensely affecting, Love is the Best Medicine is a one of a kind story only the winsome Dr. Trout could deliver and is destined to become a favorite for animal lovers.


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<p class="description">If you’ve traveled the nation’s highways, flown into New York’s LaGuardia Airport, strolled San Antonio’s River Walk, or seen the Pacific Ocean from the Beach Chalet in San Francisco, you have experienced some part of the legacy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—one of the enduring cornerstones of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, a staggering 13 million American workers were jobless and many millions more of their family members were equally in need. Desperation ruled the land.What people wanted were jobs, not handouts: the pride of earning a paycheck; and in 1935, after a variety of temporary relief measures, a permanent nationwide jobs program was created. This was the Works Progress Administration, and it would forever change the physical landscape and the social policies of the United States. The WPA lasted for eight years, spent $11 billion, employed 8½ million men and women, and gave the country not only a renewed spirit but a fresh face. Under its colorful head, Harry Hopkins, the agency’s remarkable accomplishment was to combine the urgency of putting people back to work with its vision of physically rebuilding America. Its workers laid roads, erected dams, bridges, tunnels, and airports. They stocked rivers, made toys, sewed clothes, served millions of hot school lunches. When disasters struck, they were there by the thousands to rescue the stranded. And all across the country the WPA’s arts programs performed concerts, staged plays, painted murals, delighted children with circuses, created invaluable guidebooks. Even today, more than sixty years after the WPA ceased to exist, there is almost no area in America that does not bear some visible mark of its presence.Politically controversial, the WPA was staffed by passionate believers and hated by conservatives; its critics called its projects make-work and wags said it stood for We Piddle Around. The contrary was true. We have only to look about us today to discover its lasting presence.</p>


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<p>Lonely Planet's 7th edition of Cambodia will take you into the heart of Southeast Asia: beautiful beaches (without the tourist tide), remote wilds, subtle cuisine and elaborate temples. From the famed Angkor Wat to the old-world charms of Siem Reap and the 'Phnomenal' capital city of Phnom Penh &#8211; it's all here. Lonely Planet guides are written by experts who get to the heart of every destination they visit. This fully updated edition is packed with accurate, practical and honest advice, designed to give you the information you need to make the most of your trip.<p><B>In This Guide:</B><p>Angkor revealed: we take you to the heart and soul of Cambodia<p>Go further with unrivalled coverage of increasingly popular Northwestern Cambodia<p>Green Index highlights best eco-friendly options


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<div><p><strong><em>Parks and Recreation</em> actor Nick Offerman shares his humorous musings on life, manliness, meat, and much more in his first book.</strong>  </p><p>Growing a perfect moustache, grilling red meat, wooing a woman—who better to learn from than the always charming, always manly Nick Offerman, best known as <em>Parks and Recreation</em>’s Ron Swanson? Combining his trademark comic voice and very real expertise in woodworking—he runs his own woodshop—<em>Paddle Your Own Canoe</em> features sage advice in the categories of love, etiquette, time management, diet, grooming, and self-confidence.  </p><p>Filled with “laughter, wood shavings, and kisses,” <em>Paddle Your Own Canoe</em> includes stories from Offerman’s childhood in small-town Minooka, Illinois—“I grew up literally in the middle of a cornfield”—to his beginnings as a carpenter/actor and to the hilarious seduction of his now-wife Megan Mullally. And if that wasn’t enough, Offerman also shares a haiku. About bratwurst.  </p><p>A mix of amusing anecdotes, opinionated rants, and offbeat gaiety, <em>Paddle Your Own Canoe</em> will not only delight readers but may also rouse them to put down their smartphones, study sycamore leaves, and maybe even hand carve (and paddle) their own canoes.</p></div>


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Nick Hornby returns to his roots - music and messy relationships - in this funny and touching new novel which thoughtfully and sympathetically looks at how lives can be wasted but how they are never beyond redemption. Annie lives in a dull town on England's bleak east coast and is in a relationship with Duncan which mirrors the place; Tucker was once a brilliant songwriter and performer, who's gone into seclusion in rural America - or at least that's what his fans think. Duncan is obsessed with Tucker's work, to the point of derangement, and when Annie dares to go public on her dislike of his latest album, there are quite unexpected, life-changing consequences for all three.Nick Hornby uses this intriguing canvas to explore why it is we so often let the early promise of relationships, ambition and indeed life evaporate. And he comes to some surprisingly optimistic conclusions.


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Nick Hornby has been a soccer fan since the moment he was conceived. "Fever Pitch" is his tribute to a lifelong obsession. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby's award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom -- its agony and ecstasy, its community, its defining role in thousands of young men's coming of age stories. "Fever Pitch" is one for the home team. But above all, it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season."This is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest... Fever Pitch is not only the best football book ever written, it's the funniest book of the year". -- GQ"Nick Hornby has established himself...as a maestro of the male confessional. (His) books reveal a fascination with the sheer voodoo of what so often passes for masculinity: the weird ritual facts, the useless objects, the losing clubs and teams". -- The New Yorker"Comes closer to capturing the truths and absurdities of the obsessed sports fan's mind than anyone else I have read". -- John Gaustad, Observer


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Alternate history explores the many possible directions our world could follow if certain key events didn't occur at all or were changed in some crucial way. Is our Earth the only Earth, our reality the only one that exists? Or are there many parallel worlds and societies, some very similar to ours, some barely recognizable? What if Lincoln had never become president, and the Civil War had never taken place? What if Columbus never discovered America, and the Inca developed a massive, technologically advanced empire? What if magic was real and a half-faery queen ruled England? What if Hitler and Germany won the war because America never got involved? What if many of the world's religions were totally commercialized, their temples run like casinos, religions designed purely for profit? What if an author discovered a book written by an alternate version of himself? These are just some of the possible pathways the reader can take to explore the 'Other Earths' that may be waiting just one event away.


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As Egypt's young king is crowned, a vicious killer waits in the shadows. . . .  Egypt's next Pharaoh, the young Tutankhamun, is ready to claim his birthright--a vast, powerful, and sophisticated empire. It should be at the height of its glory, but it is troubled by long-lasting foreign wars, public dissent, and internal struggles. With his new wife, Ankhesenamun, the daughter of Nefertiti, Tutankhamun undertakes an audacious plan to consolidate his power and return tolerance and enlightenment to his land. But not everyone wants the ambitious new Pharaoh to succeed, and soon sinister "gifts" begin appearing in the royal palace--evil objects designed to terrify the nineteen-year-old King.  Rahotep, the stalwart chief detective of the Thebes division, is summoned to the palace to investigate. As he begins to piece together the clues, he realizes that the mysterious gifts have much in common with a series of sadistic murders plaguing the city. Rahotep's determination to protect the vulnerable King and Queen makes him a target, too, and he is soon enmeshed in a web of intrigue and danger that reaches from the top command of the army to the dark heart of the empire's government. What he discovers will change his life and put everything he loves at risk.  In this compelling second novel, set against the dazzling splendor of the golden age of the Pharaohs, Nick Drake takes an imaginative and historically accurate look at one of the most fascinating reigns in ancient history. Drawing on the latest archaeological evidence, he crafts a sophisticated and gripping thriller that explores one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of ancient Egypt--the untimely death of young Tutankhamun.


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<p class="description">New York Magazine proclaims, "Twitter is the hot web company right now...the Next Big Thing;" the New York Times calls it "one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet;" Time magazine claims "Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app;" and Newsweek notes that "Suddenly, it seems as though all the world′s a-twitter."  Since its creation in March 2006, Twitter has unleashed a torrent of self-expression from its six million members around the world, who send and read each others′ "tweets," messages up to 140 characters in length. Friends use the site to make plans; relatives use it to stay connected; politicians use it to lobby for votes; and humorists use it to perfect their craft. In fact, Twitter users have reinvented the classic medium of the witticism in a site where anyone can be a Dorothy Parker or an Oscar Wilde.  Twitter Wit is the first compilation of Twitter aphorisms, with submissions ranging from quotidian vignettes like "I bet in Sweden the Ikea instructions are in English" to bumper sticker-type quips like "I think the bird of love is the dove. My husband thinks it′s the swallow," and contributors ranging from celebrities like Shaquille O′Neal, Jimmy Fallon, Penn Jillette, John Cleese, and Steven Fry to regular people with previously unappreciated sharp tongues. Featuring a foreword by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, this authorized anthology of the thousand most most clever and memorable "tweets" relates the diversity of human experience in hilarious bite-sized pieces.</p>


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Set adrift by his wife’s suicide and struggling to keep a grip on reality, Bunny Munro does the only thing he can think of: with his young son in tow, he hits the road. To his son, waiting patiently in the car while his father peddles beauty wares and quickies to lonely housewives in the south of England, Bunny is a hero, larger than life. But Bunny himself, haunted by what might be his wife’s ghost, seems only dimly aware of his son’s existence. When his bizarre trip shades into a final reckoning, when he can no longer be sure what is real and what is not, Bunny finally begins to recognize the love he feels for his son. And he sees that the revenants of his world—decrepit fathers, vengeful ghosts, jealous husbands and horned psychokillers—are lurking in the shadows, waiting to exact their toll. At turns dark and humane, The Death of Bunny Munro is a tender portrait of the relationship between a boy and his father, with all the wit and enigma that fans will recognize as Nick Cave’s singular vision.


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<p class="description">At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Arctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and women readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divine retribution. Against this background, and amid deep economic depression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile.Within a decade, despite crisis and catastrophe, they built a thriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on beaver fur, corn, and cattle. In doing so, they laid the foundations for Massachusetts, New England, and a new nation. Using a wealth of new evidence from landscape, archaeology, and hundreds of overlooked or neglected documents, Nick Bunker gives a vivid and strikingly original account of the Mayflower project and the first decade of the Plymouth Colony. From mercantile London and the rural England of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I to the mountains and rivers of Maine, he weaves a rich narrative that combines religion, politics, money, science, and the sea.The Pilgrims were entrepreneurs as well as evangelicals, political radicals as well as Christian idealists. Making Haste from Babylon tells their story in unrivaled depth, from their roots in religious conflict and village strife at home to their final creation of a permanent foothold in America.</p>


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<div><p>Samantha Rousseau is used to getting her hands dirty. Working on a master's degree in wildlife biology while helping take care of her sick father, she has no time for celebrity gossip, designer clothes, or lazy vacations. So when a duchess from the small country of Lilaria invites her to dinner, Samantha assumes it's to discuss a donation for the program. The truth will change the course of her life in ways she never dreamed . . .</p><p>As crown prince of Lilaria, Alex D'Lynsal has had his share of scandalous headlines, but the latest pictures in the press have sent him packing to America and forced him to swear off women. That is, until he meets Samantha Rousseau. She's stubborn, feisty, and incredibly sexy. Not to mention heiress to an estate in his country, which makes her everyone's front-page news. While Sam tries to navigate her new world of politics and wealth, she will also have to dodge her growing feelings for Alex. Giving in to them means more than just falling in love; it would mean accepting the weight of an entire country on her shoulders.</p></div>


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Jeremy Marsh is a born skeptic and a science journalist who specializes in debunking the supernatural. When he hears about ghostly apparitions in a cemetery in Boone Creek, North Carolina, he leaves his beloved New York City for this small, rural town-and what his instincts tell him could make a great story. What he doesn't plan on is meeting and falling hopelessly in love with Lexie Darnell, who is sure of one thing: her future is here in Boone Creek, close to the people she loves. Now, if the young lovers are to be together, Jeremy must make a difficult choice: return to the life he knows in New York, or do something he could never do before... take a giant leap of faith.


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<p>As moving as his bestselling works of fiction, Nicholas Sparks's unique memoir, written with his brother, chronicles the life-affirming journey of two brothers bound by memories, both humorous and tragicIn January 2003, Nicholas Sparks and his brother, Micah, set off on a three-week trip around the globe. It was to mark a milestone in their lives, for at thirty-seven and thirty-eight respectively, they were now the only surviving members of their family. Against the backdrop of the wonders of the world and often overtaken by their feelings, daredevil Micah and the more serious, introspective Nicholas recalled their rambunctious childhood adventures and the tragedies that tested their faith. And in the process, they discovered startling truths about loss, love, and hope.Narrated with irrepressible humor and rare candor, and including personal photos, THREE WEEKS WITH MY BROTHER reminds us to embrace life with all its uncertainties...and most of all, to cherish the joyful times, both small and momentous, and the wonderful people who make them possible.</p>


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- Nicholas Sparks' most recent novel, "The Guardian (4/03), was an instant "New York Times bestseller with nearly 700,000 hardcover copies in print to date.- "Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, 9/02), with 875,000 copies in hardcover print alone; "A Bend in the Road (Warner, 9/01), with nearly 2.4 million copies in print combined; and "The Rescue (Warner, 2000), with 2.7 million copies in print combined all rocketed to #1 on the "New York Times bestseller list.- "A Walk to Remember (Warner, 2000), with nearly four million copies in combined print, was an instant "New York Times bestseller. The Warner Bros, feature film version was a surprise hit in 2001.- "The Notebook (Warner, 1996), the prequel to THE WEDDING, was on the "New York Times bestseller list for over one year and has nearly 4.5 million copies in print combined. The feature film produced by New Line and scheduled for release in Fall 2003, stars James Garner and Gena Rowlands and was directed by Nick Cassavettes.


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Set amid the austere beauty of coastal North Carolina in 1946, "The Notebook" begins with the story of Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner returned home from World War II. Noah, 31, is restoring a plantation home to its former glory, and he is haunted by images of the beautiful girl he met 14 years earlier, a girl he loved like no other. Unable to find her, yet unwilling to forget the summer they spent together, Noah is content to live with only memories...until she unexpectedly returns to his town to see him once more. Allie Nelson, 29, is now engaged to another man, but realizes that the original passion she felt for Noah has not dimmed with the passage of time. Still, the obstacles that once ended their previous relationship remain, and the gulf between their worlds is too vast to ignore. With her impending marriage only weeks away, Allie is forced to confront her hopes and dreams for the future, a future that only she can shape. Like a puzzle within a puzzle, the story of Noah and Allie is just the beginning. As it unfolds, their tale miraculously becomes something different, with much higher stakes. The result is a deeply moving portrait of love itself, the tender moments and the fundamental changes that affect us all.


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<p>In his 14th book, bestselling author Nicholas Sparks tells the unforgettable story of a man whose brushes with death lead him to the love of his life. </p><p>After U.S. Marine Logan Thibault finds a photograph of a smiling young woman buried in the dirt during his tour of duty in Iraq, he experiences a sudden streak of luck  winning poker games and even surviving deadly combat. Only his best friend, Victor, seems to have an explanation for his good fortune: the photograph  his lucky charm. </p><p>Back home in Colorado, Thibault can't seem to get the woman in the photograph out of his mind and he sets out on a journey across the country to find her. But Thibault is caught off guard by the strong attraction he feels for the woman he encounters in North Carolina - Elizabeth, a divorced mother  and he keeps the story of the photo, and his luck, a secret. As he and Elizabeth embark upon a passionate love affair, his secret soon threatens to tear them apart  destroying not only their love, but also their lives. </p><p>Filled with tender romance and terrific suspense, THE LUCKY ONE is an unforgettable story about the surprising paths our lives often take and the power of fate to guide us to true and everlasting love. </p>


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<div><p>In the tradition of his beloved first novel, <em>The Notebook</em>, #1 <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author Nicholas Sparks returns with the remarkable story of two couples whose lives intersect in profound and surprising ways.  </p><p>Ira Levinson is in trouble. Ninety-one years old and stranded and injured after a car crash, he struggles to retain consciousness until a blurry image materializes beside him: his beloved wife Ruth, who passed away nine years ago. Urging him to hang on, she forces him to remain alert by recounting the stories of their lifetime together - how they met, the precious paintings they collected together, the dark days of WWII and its effect on them and their families. Ira knows that Ruth can't possibly be in the car with him, but he clings to her words and his memories, reliving the sorrows and everyday joys that defined their marriage.  </p><p>A few miles away, at a local bull-riding event, a Wake Forest College senior's life is about to change. Recovering from a recent break-up, Sophia Danko meets a young cowboy named Luke, who bears little resemblance to the privileged frat boys she has encountered at school. Through Luke, Sophia is introduced to a world in which the stakes of survival and success, ruin and reward -- even life and death - loom large in everyday life. As she and Luke fall in love, Sophia finds herself imagining a future far removed from her plans -- a future that Luke has the power to rewrite . . . if the secret he's keeping doesn't destroy it first.  </p><p>Ira and Ruth. Sophia and Luke. Two couples who have little in common, and who are separated by years and experience. Yet their lives will converge with unexpected poignancy, reminding us all that even the most difficult decisions can yield extraordinary journeys: beyond despair, beyond death, to the farthest reaches of the human heart.</p></div>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">Seventeen year old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alientated from her parents, especially her father...until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if she spent the summer in Wilmington with him. Ronnie's father, a former concert pianist and teacher, is living a quiet life in the beach town, immersed in creating a work of art that will become the centerpiece of a local church. The tale that unfolds is an unforgettable story of love on many levels--first love, love between parents and children -- that demonstrates, as only a Nicholas Sparks novel can, the many ways that love can break our hearts...and heal them.</span></h3>

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When a mysterious young woman named Katie appears in the small North Carolina town of Southport, her sudden arrival raises questions about her past. Beautiful yet self-effacing, Katie seems determined to avoid forming personal ties until a series of events draws her into two reluctant relationships: one with Alex, a widowed store owner with a kind heart and two young children; and another with her plainspoken single neighbor, Jo. Despite her reservations, Katie slowly begins to let down her guard, putting down roots in the close-knit community and becoming increasingly attached to Alex and his family.But even as Katie begins to fall in love, she struggles with the dark secret that still haunts and terrifies her . . . a past that set her on a fearful, shattering journey across the country, to the sheltered oasis of Southport. With Jo's empathic and stubborn support, Katie eventually realizes that she must choose between a life of transient safety and one of riskier rewards . . . and that in the darkest hour, love is the only true safe haven.


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; "><em>Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She'd believed in it once, too, back when she was eighteen.</em></span></h3><p>In the spring of 1984, high school students Amanda Collier and Dawson Cole fell deeply, irrevocably in love. Though they were from opposite sides of the tracks, their love for one another seemed to defy the realities of life in the small town of Oriental, North Carolina. But as the summer of their senior year came to a close, unforeseen events would tear the young couple apart, setting them on radically divergent paths.<br></p><p>Now, twenty-five years later, Amanda and Dawson are summoned back to Oriental for the funeral of Tuck Hostetler, the mentor who once gave shelter to their high school romance. Neither has lived the life they imagined . . . and neither can forget the passionate first love that forever changed their lives. As Amanda and Dawson carry out the instructions Tuck left behind for them, they realize that everything they thought they knew -- about Tuck, about themselves, and about the dreams they held dear -- was not as it seemed. Forced to confront painful memories, the two former lovers will discover undeniable truths about the choices they have made. And in the course of a single, searing weekend, they will ask of the living, and the dead: <em>Can love truly rewrite the past?</em></p></div>


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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Nicholas Sparks comes a tender story of hope and joy, of sacrifice and forgiveness-a moving reminder that love is possible at any age, at any time, and often comes when we least expect it. At forty-five, Adrienne Willis must rethink her entire life when her husband abandons her for a younger woman. Reeling with heartache and in search of a respite, she flees to the small coastal town of Rodanthe, North Carolina, to tend to a friend's inn for the weekend. But when a major storm starts moving in, it appears that Adrienne's perfect getaway will be ruined-until a guest named Paul Flanner arrives. At fifty-four, Paul has just sold his medical practice and come to Rodanthe to escape his own shattered past. Now, with the storm closing in, two wounded people will turn to each other for comfort-and in one weekend set in motion feelings that will resonate throughout the rest of their lives.


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An angry rebel, John dropped out of school and enlisted in the Army, not knowing what else to do with his life--until he meets the girl of his dreams, Savannah. Their mutual attraction quickly grows into the kind of love that leaves Savannah waiting for John to finish his tour of duty, and John wanting to settle down with the woman who captured his heart. But 9/11 changes everything. John feels it is his duty to re-enlist. And sadly, the long separation finds Savannah falling in love with someone else. "Dear John," the letter read...and with those two words, a heart was broken and two lives were changed forever. Returning home, John must come to grips with the fact that Savannah, now married, is still his true love--and face the hardest decision of his life.


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Divorced and disillusioned about relationships, Theresa Osborne is jogging when she finds a bottle on the beach. Inside is a letter of love and longing to "Catherine," signed simply "Garrett." Challenged by the mystery and pulled by emotions she doesn't fully understand, Theresa begins a search for this man that will change her life. What happens to her is unexpected, perhaps miraculous-an encounter that embraces all our hopes for finding someone special, for having a love that is timeless and everlasting.... Nicholas Sparks exquisitely chronicles the human heart. In his first bestselling novel, The Notebook, he created a testament to romantic love that touched readers around the world. Now in this New York Times bestseller, he renews our faith in destiny, in the ability of lovers to find each other no matter where, no matter when...


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There are a few things Jeremy Marsh was sure he'd never do: he'd never leave New York City; never give his heart away again after barely surviving one failed marriage; and, most of all, never become a parent. Now, Jeremy is living in the tiny town of Boone Creek, North Carolina, married to Lexie Darnell, the love of his life, and anticipating the birth of their daughter. But just as his life seems to be settling into a blissful pattern, an unsettling and mysterious message re-opens old wounds and sets off a chain of events that will forever change the course of this young couple's marriage. Dramatic, heartbreaking and surprising, this is a story about the love between a man and a woman and between a parent and a child. More than that, it is a story that beautifully portrays how the same emotion that can break your heart is also the one that will ultimately heal it.While the novel picks up the tale of Lexie Darnell and Jeremy Marsh that started in True Believer and will delight fans of that novel, it stands on its own as one of Nicholas Sparks's most deeply moving love stories.


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There was a time when the world was sweeter....when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats.... Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town's Baptist minister....Jamie, who was destined to show him the depths of the human heart-and the joy and pain of living. The inspiration for this novel came from Nicholas Sparks's sister: her life and her courage. From the internationally bestselling author Nicholas Sparks, comes his most moving story yet....


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Miles Ryan's life seemed to end the day his wife was killed in a hit-and-run accident two years ago. As deputy sheriff of New Bern, North Carolina, he not only grieves for her and worries about their young son Jonah but longs to bring the unknown driver to justice. Then Miles meets Sarah Andrews, Jonah's second-grade teacher. A young woman recovering from a difficult divorce, Sarah moved to New Bern hoping to start over. Tentatively, Miles and Sarah reach out to each other...soon they are falling in love. But what neither realizes is that they are also bound together by a shocking secret, one that will force them to reexamine everything they believe in-including their love.


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"At the age of twelve my ambition was to become a gangster. To be a wiseguy. Being a wiseguy was better than being President of the United States. To be a wiseguy was to own the world." -- Henry HillWiseguy is Nicholas Pileggi's remarkable bestseller, the most intimate account ever printed of life inside the deadly high-stakes world of what some people call the Mafia. Wiseguy is Henry Hill's story, in fascinating, brutal detail, the never-before-revealed day-to-day life of a working mobster -- his violence, his wild spending sprees, his wife, his mistresses, his code of honor.Henry Hill knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he turned Federal witness to save his own life. The mob is still hunting him for what he reveals in Wiseguy: hundreds of crimes including arson, extortion, hijacking, and the $6 million Lufthansa heist, the biggest successful cash robbery in U.S. history, which led to ten murders. A firsthand account of the secret world of the mob,Wiseguy is more compelling than any novel.


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From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world. With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope. They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS. Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women's potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it's also the best strategy for fighting poverty. Deeply felt, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half the Skyis essential reading for every global citizen.


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<p class="description">Boothman breaks down the process of connecting with people into discrete steps--meeting, establishing rapport, and opening up communication--and provides simple examples, self-assessments, exercises, and sample dialogue. </p>


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<p class="description">When Machiavelli's brief treatise on Renaissance statecraft and princely power was posthumously published in 1532, it generated a debate that has raged unabated until the present day. Based upon Machiavelli's first-hand experience as an emissary of the Florentine Republic to the courts of Europe, The Prince analyses the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power. Machiavelli added a dimension of incisive realism to one of the major philosophical and political issues of his time, especially the relationship between public deeds and private morality. His book provides a remarkably uncompromising picture of the true nature of power, no matter in what era or by whom it is exercised. This fluent new translation is accompanied by an introduction that considers the true purpose of The Prince and dispels some of the myths associated with it. It has the most comprehensive explanatory and critical notes found in any currently available English translation and the most comprehensive bibliography in any edition of the work. It also contains a helpful Glossary of Proper Names, an Index and a map.</p>


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<p class="description">FINALIST--2008 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZEIn The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, Peter Constantine has assembled a comprehensive collection that shows the true depth and breadth of a great Renaissance thinker. Refreshingly accessible, these superb new translations are faithful to Machiavelli’s original, beautifully crafted writings.The volume features essays that appear in English for the first time, such as “A Caution to the Medici” and “The Persecution of Africa.” Also included are complete versions of the political treatise, The Prince, the comic satire The Mandrake, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, and the classic story “Belfagor”, along with selections from The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. Augmented with useful features–vital and concise annotations and cross-references–this unique compendium is certain to become the standard one-volume reference to this influential, versatile, and ever timely writer.“Machiavelli's stress on political necessity rather than moral perfection helped inspire the Renaissance by renewing links with Thucydides and other classical thinkers. This new collection provides deeper insight into Machiavelli’s personality as a writer, thus broadening our understanding of him.”–Robert D. Kaplan, author of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos “Constantine’s selection is not only intelligent; his translations are astonishingly good. Thoughtfully introduced by Albert Russell Ascoli, this edition belongs in everyone’s library.”–John Jeffries Martin, professor and chair, department of history, Trinity University“If one were to assign a single edition of Machiavelli's works, this most certainly would be it.”–John P. McCormick, professor, department of political science, University of Chicago</p>


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Ellie Faulkner's world has been destroyed. Her husband Greg died in a car crash and he wasn't alone. In the passenger seat was the body of Milena Livingstone a woman Ellie's never heard of. But Ellie refuses to leap to the obvious conclusion, despite the whispers and suspicions of those around her. Maybe it's the grief, but Ellie has to find out who this woman was and prove Greg wasn't having an affair. And soon she is chillingly certain their deaths were no accident. Are Ellie's accusations of murder her way of avoiding the truth about her marriage? Or does an even more sinister discovery await her?


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Nicci French, bestselling author of thriller Blue Monday, tells the adrenaline-charged story of a woman simply trying to help but exposing herself to terrible danger in The Safe House.  Samantha Laschen is a doctor specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder. She's moved to the coast to escape her problems and to be alone with her young daughter. But now the police want her to take in Fiona Mackenzie, a girl whose parents have been savagely murdered. Yet by allowing Fiona in, Sam is exposing herself - and her daughter - to risks she couldn't possibly have imagined.  'A superior psychological thriller' The Times   Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Together they have written 13 books, including Losing You, What to do When Someone Dies and Until It's Over.


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Nicci French, bestselling author of thriller Blue Monday, tells the terrifying story of a woman discovering that her past is not as she remembers it in The Memory Game. You remember an ordinary, idyllic childhood. Then one day you discover that your memory is deceitful. And possibly deadly ... When a skeleton is unearthed, Jane Martello is shocked to learn it's that of her childhood friend, Natalie, who went missing twenty-five years ago. Encouraged by a therapist to recover lost memories, Jane hopes to find out what really took place when she was a child - and what happened to Natalie. But in learning the truth about hers and Natalie's past, is Jane putting her own future at terrible risk? 'Haunting' Frances Fyfield, Evening Standard Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Together they have written 13 books, including Complicit, What to do When Someone Dies and Until It's Over.


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<p>Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Even so, he felt like he would always be able to quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. It took a violent relapse one summer in California to convince him otherwise. In a voice that is raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling us the compelling, heartbreaking, and true story of his relapse and the road to recovery. As we watch Nic plunge the mental and physical depths of drug addiction, he paints a picture for us of a person at odds with his past, with his family, with his substances, and with himself. It's a harrowing portrait -- but not one without hope. </p>


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<p>Niall Ferguson's House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets 1798-1848 was hailed as a "great biography" by Time magazine and named one of the ten best books of 1998 by Business Week. Now, with all the depth, clarity, and drama with which he traced their ascent, Ferguson -- the first historian with access to long-lost Rothschild family archives -- continues and concludes his myth-breaking portrait of one of the most fascinating and powerful families of modern times. </p><p>From Crimea to World War II, wars repeatedly threatened the stability of the Rothschilds' worldwide empire. Despite these many global upheavals, theirs remained the biggest bank in the world up until the First World War, their interests extending far beyond the realm of finance. Yet the Rothschilds' failure to establish themselves successfully in the United States proved fateful, and as financial power shifted from London to New York after 1914, their power waned. At once a classic family saga and a major work of economic, social, and political history, The House of Rothschild is the definitive biography of one of the most powerful firms of the nineteenth century and the riveting story of an exceptional family.</p>


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In his rich and nuanced portrait of the remarkable, elusive Rothschild family, Oxford scholar and bestselling author Niall Ferguson uncovers the secrets behind the family's phenomenal economic success. He reveals for the first time the details of the family's vast political network, which gave it access to and influence over many of the greatest statesmen of the age. And he tells a family saga, tracing the importance of family unity and the profound role of Judaism in the lives of a dynasty that rose from the confines of the Frankfurt ghetto and later used its influence to assist oppressed Jews throughout Europe. A definitive work of impeccable scholarship with a thoroughly engaging narrative, The House of Rothschild is a biography of the rarest kind, in which mysterious and fascinating historical figures finally spring to life.


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<p class="description">Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.  Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, itas the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, itas the chains of labor. But in "The Ascent of Money," Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. Whatas more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.  Through Fergusonas expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the worldas first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.  With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? Whatas the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?  This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market canat provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis. Perhaps most important, "The Ascent of Money" documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the worldas biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generationaan economic transformation unprecedented in human history.  Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble burstsasooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And thatas why, whether youare scraping by or rolling in it, thereas never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.</p>


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<p>Ferguson is the most brilliant British historian of his generation ... 
he writes with splendid panache The Times  One of the world's leading 
historians -- Hamish McRae Independent  [Praise for The Ascent of Money]
 Beautifully written... Breathtakingly clever -- Martin Van Weyer Sunday
 Telegraph  [Praise for The Ascent of Money] The tales he tells of boom 
and bust, of triumph and disaster, of bubbles that inflate... are the 
very essence of financial history -- Bill Emmott Financial Times  
[Praise for The Ascent of Money]  An often enlightening and enjoyable 
tour through the underside of great events, a lesson in how the most 
successful great powers have always been underpinned by smart money</p>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">Celebrated African author and activist Thiong'o tells no ordinary coming-of-age tale. The fifth child of his father's third wife—one of an extended family whose collective experiences range from rural farming and carpentry to WWII rifleman—Ngugi skillfully recounts the challenges and calamities of growing up in British-occupied Kenya. Born in 1938, he recalls a boyhood framed by his pursuit of education (he had a unspoken pact with his mother to always do his best) and by his developing awareness of nationalist politics. Through teachers and local storytellers he hears of such world figures as Winston Churchill, Jomo Kenyatta, and Jesse Owens; at home he eventually discovers that within his own family there are both Mau Mau rebels and colonial sympathizers. Tensions between tradition and modernity, a theme Ngugi explored in his first novel, 1964's <em>Weep Not Child</em>), become apparent in his fascination with the Old Testament and Christianity, and his fear when he is interrogated by military authorities. For readers, sequential time surrenders to a sense of narrative and an engaging humanity. </span></h3>


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<div><p> What time is it at the North Pole? </p><p> What's the chemical formula for a human being? </p><p> Why do boomerangs come back? </p><p> Why do flying fish fly? </p><p> Do the living really outnumber the dead? </p><p> Why does lightning fork? </p><p> Why does the end of a whip crack? </p><p>Everyone has at one time or another thought up odd questions like these, questions that are strange, intriguing, maybe even impossible to answer. Making your morning omelet, perhaps you've wondered why most eggs are egg shaped. Or maybe, the last time you walked on the beach, you felt compelled to ask why the sea is salty. Watching Polly sit on her perch, have you ever marveled at how she stays there -- even when she's asleep? Well, the readers of New Scientist's wildly popular, long-running column "The Last Word" thought of these questions, too, and weren't afraid to ask them. </p><p><em>Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?</em> is a brilliant collection of questions and answers for everyone who enjoyed the international, runaway bestseller <em>Does Anything Eat Wasps?</em> Guaranteed to amaze, inform, and delight with topics such as the human body, plants and animals, weird weather, and our wacky world, it'll stump you, enlighten you, entertain and amuse you. </p></div>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">Well, why not? Is it because elephants are too large or heavy (after all, they say hippos and rhinos can play hopscotch)? Or is it because their knees face the wrong way? Or do they just wait until no one's looking? Read this brilliant new compilation to find out.This is popular science at its most absorbing and enjoyable. That is why the previous titles in the New Scientist series have been international bestsellers and sold over twomillion copies between them. Like Does Anything Eat Wasps? (2005), Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? (2006) and Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? (2008), this is another wonderful collection of wise, witty and oftensurprising answers to a staggering range of science questions, from 'why is frozen milk yellow?' to 'what's the storage capacity of the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">human brain in gigabytes'.</span></h3></div>


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<div><p>Anna Pigeon's first case—this is the story her fans have been clamoring for...this is where it all starts.</p><p>In The Rope, the latest in Nevada Barr’s bestselling novels featuring Anna Pigeon, Nevada Barr gathers together the many strings of Anna’s past and finally reveals the story that her many fans have been long asking for. In 1995 and 35 years old, fresh off the bus from New York City and nursing a broken heart, Anna Pigeon takes a decidedly unglamorous job as a seasonal employee of the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area. On her day off, Anna goes hiking into the park never to return. Her co-workers think she’s simply moved on—her cabin is cleaned out and her things gone. But Anna herself wakes up, trapped at the bottom of a dry natural well, naked, without supplies and no clear memory of how she found herself in this situation.</p><p>As she slowly pieces together her memory, it soon becomes clear that someone has trapped her there, in an inescapable prison, and no one knows that she is even missing. Plunged into a landscape and a plot she is unfit and untrained to handle, Anna Pigeon must muster the courage, determination and will to live that she didn’t even know she still possessed to survive, outwit and triumph.</p><p>For those legions of readers who have been entranced over the years by Park Ranger Anna Pigeon’s strength and determination and those who are new to Nevada Barr’s captivating, compelling novels, this is where it all starts.</p></div>


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<p class="description">The first novel featuring park ranger Anna Pigeon is reissued. When a fellow ranger is killed and his death is ruled a mountain lion attack, Anna's suspicions are raised. It's up to her to save the protected cats from the prejudiced locals--and prove the kill was the work of a species far less rare.</p>


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<p class="description">In this brain-teasing follow-up to the smash-hit debut, The Crossword Murder, P.I. Rosco Polycrates returns to discover that -- up, down, or across -- S.O.S. spells danger.</p>


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<p class="description">Crossword puzzle editor Belle Graham comes to the aid of her husband, Roscoe, as they investigate a devastating fire at the Collins family stables, which is being blamed on a hard-drinking manager, and discover a dysfunctional family made up of an aged patriarch, his grown children, and his much-younger bride.</p>


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<p class="description">Nevada Barr brings her acclaimed New York Times bestselling Anna Pigeon series to Minotaur Books with one of her most compelling, complex novels yet! Anna Pigeon, a Ranger with the National Park Service, is newly married but on administrative leave from her job as she recovers from the traumas of the past couple of months. While the physical wounds have healed, the emotional ones are still healing. With her new husband back at work, Anna decides to go and stay with an old friend from the Park Service, Geneva, who works as a singer at the New Orleans Jazz NHP. She isn’t in town long before she crosses paths with a tenant of Geneva’s, a creepy guy named Jordan. She discovers what seems to be an attempt to place a curse on her—a gruesomely killed pigeon marked with runic symbols; and begins to slowly find traces of very dark doings in the heart of post-Katrina New Orleans. Tied up in all of this is Jordan, who is not at all what he appears to be; a fugitive mother accused of killing her husband and daughters in a fire; and faint whispers of unpleasant goings-on in the heart of the slowly recovering city. Now it will take all of Anna’s skills learned in the untamed outdoors to navigate the urban jungle in which she finds herself, to uncover the threads that connect these seemingly disparate people, and to rescue the most vulnerable of creatures from the most savage of animals.</p>


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<p class="description">Asad Khalil (aka "The Lion"), the ruthless Libyan terrorist who menaced ex-NYPD cop John Corey in The Lion's Game (2000), returns to the U.S. 18 months after 9/11, bent on finishing old business in DeMille's fast-paced fifth John Corey thriller (after Wild Fire). In Los Angeles, Khalil dispatches the last of the eight American pilots who dropped the bombs that killed Khalil's family in the historic 1986 raid on Tripoli. In New York City, a daring encounter with Corey, a member of the federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force, and Corey's FBI agent wife, Kate Mayfield, who's also a member of the ATTF, sets the stage for the mano a mano struggle both Corey and Khalil crave. DeMille splices gripping action scenes with accounts of Khalil's horrifically inventive attacks and the ATTF's futile countermeasures. While Corey isn't much more appealing than his foe, those who enjoy starkly black-and-white battles between good and evil will be satisfied. </p>


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<p>Scare yourself silly ghost-hunting in Edinburgh's spooky underworld<p>Laugh at the antics of the puffins on Unst, Britain's most northerly inhabited island<p>Find your inner Scot and enjoy a traditional <I>ceilidh</I> at Scotland's remotest pub<p>Challenge your tastebuds and tuck into some haggis - sounds nasty, tastes fantastic<p><B>In This Guide:</B><p>Two authors, 1000 hours of research, 76 detailed maps<p>Full-color chapters uncover Scotland's regions and pick out the country's highlights<p>Get the local lowdown on whale watching, Munro bagging and life as a Highland artist<p>Content updated daily - visit <B>lonelyplanet.com</B> for up to the minute reviews and traveler insights


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Long Walk to Freedom is a brilliant autobiography of Nelson Mandela, capturing his generosity, patience and fortitude as he relentlessly fought against the inhuman system of apartheid. Providing a riveting insider's view into the political cauldron that is South Africa, Mandela's memoirs highlight his historic achievement in 1990 when he walked out of jail to liberty and leadership.


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">Following conviction for bank fraud, White spent a year in a minimum-security prison in Carville, La., housed in the last leper colony in mainland America. His fascinating memoir reflects on the sizable group of lepers living alongside the prisoners, social outcasts among the motley inmate crew of drug dealers, mob types and killers. Narrating in colorful, entertaining snapshots, White introduces the reader to an excellent supporting cast in his imprisonment: Father Reynolds, the peerless spiritual monk; Mr. Flowers, the no-nonsense case manager; Anne, the sorrowful mother with leprosy whose baby was taken from her arms; and Ella the Earth Mother, with wisdom to spare. Brisk, ironic and perceptive, White's introspective memoir puts a magnifying glass to a flawed life, revealing that all of life is to be savored and respected. </span></h3>


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<p class="description">In The Game, Neil Strauss delves into the bizarre underworld of 'pickup artists' - men who have devoted their lives to different techniques of seducing women. These are men with their own vernacular and codes of honour, who operate online and in person, who are so committed to honing their strategies that they give each other seminars and live together in shared houses - or 'Projects', as they like to call them. Neil Strauss lived amongst the players and survived - but not before he became one of them. In the course of two years, he transformed himself from a self-confessed balding, skinny writer into the quick-thinking, smooth-talking Style, a character irresistible to women, half psychologist, half magician. He became friends with the other players. He used his Game techniques on Britney Spears. By turns jaw-dropping, poignant and side-splittingly funny, The Game is a gripping portrait of a mad, self-referential community in the process of slow implosion. With guest appearances from Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise (whose character in Magnolia is based on a real-life pickup artist) and Courtney Love, who lived with Neil in 'Project Hollywood' for a while, The Game is also the most sensational relationships manual since The Rules - essential reading for men and women alike.</p>


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<p class="description">#1 New York Times bestselling author, Nelson DeMille, delivers an explosive thriller of international intrigue and high-voltage political tension set in contemporary Russia.On a dark road deep inside Russia, a young American tourist picks up a most unusual passenger a U.S. POW on the run with an incredible secret to reveal to an unsuspecting world. The secret concerns "The Charm School," a vast and astounding KGB conspiracy that stands poised against the very heartland of America. Arrayed against this renegade power of the Soviet state are three Americans: an Air Force officer, who will fly one last covert mission into the center of a mad experiment; an embassy liaison, who will have her hopes for a saner superpower balance brutally tested; and the chief of the CIA's Moscow station, who will find his intricate dance of destiny and death reaching its devastating conclusion.</p>


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From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize—winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history–and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever’s quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust rather than to be fired in anger.Sheehan melds biography and history, politics and science, to create a sweeping narrative that transports the reader back and forth from individual drama to world stage. The narrative takes us from Schriever’s boyhood in Texas as a six-year-old immigrant from Germany in 1917 through his apprenticeship in the open-cockpit biplanes of the Army Air Corps in the 1930s and his participation in battles against the Japanese in the South Pacific during the Second World War. On his return, he finds a new postwar bipolar universe dominated by the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union.Inspired by his technological vision, Schriever sets out in 1954 to create the one class of weapons that can enforce peace with the Russians–intercontinental ballistic missiles that are unstoppable and can destroy the Soviet Union in thirty minutes. In the course of his crusade, he encounters allies and enemies among some of the most intriguing figures of the century: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was second in genius only to Einstein; Colonel Edward Hall, who created the ultimate ICBM in the Minuteman missile, and his brother, Theodore Hall, who spied for the Russians at Los Alamos and hastened their acquisition of the atomic bomb; Curtis LeMay, the bomber general who tried to exile Schriever and who lost his grip on reality, amassing enough nuclear weapons in his Strategic Air Command to destroy the entire Northern Hemisphere; and Hitler’s former rocket maker, Wernher von Braun, who along with a colorful, riding-crop-wielding Army general named John Medaris tried to steal the ICBM program.The most powerful men on earth are also put into astonishing relief: Joseph Stalin, the cruel, paranoid Soviet dictator who spurred his own scientists to build him the atomic bomb with threats of death; Dwight Eisenhower, who backed the ICBM program just in time to save it from the bureaucrats; Nikita Khrushchev, who brought the world to the edge of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John Kennedy, who saved it.Schriever and his comrades endured the heartbreak of watching missiles explode on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral and savored the triumph of seeing them soar into space. In the end, they accomplished more than achieving a fiery peace in a cold war. Their missiles became the vehicles that opened space for America.


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<p>Scotland's history has been badly served over the years. Defined by its relationship to England, Scotland's popular history is full of near-mythical figures and tragic events, her past littered with defeat, failure and thwarted ambition. The martyrdom of William Wallace, the tragedy of Mary Queen of Scots and the forlorn cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie all give the impression of 'poor' Scotland; a victim of misfortune, leading to the country's inevitable submission to the Auld Enemy. After the Union in 1707, Scotland's increasing reliance on England culminated in a crisis of confidence and identity that tortures the country to this day. But how accurate is this version of events? Using the very latest in historical research and by placing Scotland's story in the wider context of British, European and global history, some of the myths that pervade the past will be exploded to reveal a Scotland which forged its own destiny, often with success. </p>


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<p class="description">The Outsiders is a collection of 13 dark fantasy stories from some of the best names and bright new names in dark fiction. An eclectic mix of styles and genres lurk within these pages...so uncork a glass of wine, dim the lights, sit back in a comfy chair...and enjoy this offering from Ghostwriter Publications.</p>


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<div><p>A brilliantly imaginative and poignant fairy tale from the modern master of wonder and terror, <em>The Ocean at the End of the Lane</em> is Neil Gaiman’s first new novel for adults since his #1 <em>New York Times</em> bestseller <em>Anansi Boys.</em></p><p>This bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival, and memory and magic, makes the impossible all too real...</p></div>


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Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy.   He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead.   There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy-an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer.   But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family. . . .   Beloved master storyteller Neil Gaiman returns with a luminous new novel for the audience that embraced his New York Times bestselling modern classic Coraline. Magical, terrifying, and filled with breathtaking adventures, the graveyard book is sure to enthrall readers of all ages.


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<p>In what Tor.com calls their "greatest [collaboration] to date," <em>New York Times</em> bestselling and Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning author Neil Gaiman and Kate Greenaway-winning illustrator Chris Riddell have created a thrillingly reimagined fairy tale, "told in a way only Gaiman can" and featuring "stunning metallic artwork" (GeekInsider.com).</p><p>The result is a beautiful and coveted edition of <em>The Sleeper and the Spindle</em> that the <em>Guardian</em> calls "a refreshing, much-needed twist on a classic story."</p><p>In this captivating and darkly funny tale, Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell have twisted together the familiar and the new as well as the beautiful and the wicked to tell a brilliant version of Snow White's (sort of) and Sleeping Beauty's (almost) stories.</p><p>This story was originally published (without illustrations) in <em>Rags &amp; Bones</em> (Little, Brown, 2013). This is the first time it is being published as an illustrated, stand-alone edition, and the book is a beautiful work of art.</p><p>**</p>


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<p class="description">"Stories" is a groundbreaking anthology that reinvigorates, expands, and redefines the limits of imaginative fiction and affords some of the best writers in the world--from Peter Straub and Chuck Palahniuk to Roddy Doyle and Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O'Nan and Joyce Carol Oates to Walter Mosley and Jodi Picoult--the opportunity to work together, defend their craft, and realign misconceptions. Gaiman, a literary magician whose acclaimed work defies easy categorization and transcends all boundaries, and "master anthologist" ("Booklist") Sarrantonio personally invited, read, and selected all the stories in this collection, and their standard for this "new literature of the imagination" is high. "We wanted to read stories that used a lightning-flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it at all." Joe Hill boldly aligns theme and form in his disturbing tale of a man's descent into evil in "Devil on the Staircase." In "Catch and Release," Lawrence Block tells of a seasoned fisherman with a talent for catching a bite of another sort. Carolyn Parkhurst adds a dark twist to sibling rivalry in "Unwell." Joanne Harris weaves a tale of ancient gods in modern New York in "Wildfire in Manhattan." Vengeance is the heart of Richard Adams's "The Knife." Jeffery Deaver introduces a dedicated psychologist whose mission in life is to save people in "The Therapist." A chilling punishment befitting an unspeakable crime is at the dark heart of Neil Gaiman's novelette "The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains." As it transforms your view of the world, this brilliant and visionary volume--sure to become a classic--will ignite a new appreciation for the limitless realm of exceptional fiction.</p>


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In the deft hands of Neil Gaiman, magic is no mere illusion . . . and anything is possible. In Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman's imagination and supreme artistry transform a mundane world into a place of terrible wonders—where an old woman can purchase the Holy Grail at a thrift store, where assassins advertise their services in the Yellow Pages under "Pest Control," and where a frightened young boy must barter for his life with a mean-spirited troll living beneath a bridge by the railroad tracks. Explore a new reality, obscured by smoke and darkness yet brilliantly tangible, in this extraordinary collection of short works by a master prestidigitator. It will dazzle your senses, touch your heart, and haunt your dreams.


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Catch a fallen star . . .   Tristran thorn promised to bring back a fallen star. So he sets out on a journey to fulfill the request of his beloved, the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester—and stumbles into the enchanted realm that lies beyond the wall of his English country town. Rich with adventure and magic, Stardust is one of master storyteller Neil Gaiman's most beloved tales, and the inspiration for the hit movie.


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In this inventive, short, yet perfectly formed novel inspired by traditional Norse mythology, Neil Gaiman takes readers on a wild and magical trip to the land of giants and gods and back.   In a village in ancient Norway lives a boy named Odd, and he's had some very bad luck: His father perished in a Viking expedition; a tree fell on and shattered his leg; the endless freezing winter is making villagers dangerously grumpy.   Out in the forest Odd encounters a bear, a fox, and an eagle—three creatures with a strange story to tell.   Now Odd is forced on a stranger journey than he had imagined—a journey to save Asgard, city of the gods, from the Frost Giants who have invaded it.   It's going to take a very special kind of twelve-year-old boy to outwit the Frost Giants, restore peace to the city of gods, and end the long winter.   Someone cheerful and infuriating and clever . . .   Someone just like Odd .


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Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her - and the life he knows vanishes like smoke. Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won't stop for him, his landlord rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness - to a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere. For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family's slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door's entourage in their determined - and possibly fatal - quest. For the dread journey ever-downward - through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time - is Richard's final hope, his last road back to a 'real' world that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.


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Stories to delight, enchant, and surprise you.   Bestselling author and master storyteller Neil Gaiman here presents a breathtaking collection of tales that may chill or amuse readers—but always embrace the unexpected:   A teenage boy who has trouble talking to girls finds himself at a rather unusual party. A sinister jack-in-the-box haunts the lives of the children who owned it. A boy raised in a graveyard makes a discovery and confronts the much more troubling world of the living. A stray cat fights a nightly battle to protect his adopted family from a terrible evil.   These eleven stories illuminate the real and the fantastic, and will be welcomed with great joy by Neil Gaiman's many fans as well as by readers coming to his work for the first time.


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An astounding tale of adventure, danger, magic, science, friendship, spaceships, and, oh yeah, the battle to save all the people in all the worlds in all possible dimensions.   Joey Harker isn't a hero.   In fact, he's the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house.   But one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension.   Joey's walk between worlds makes him prey to armies of magic and science, both determined to harness Joey's power to travel between the dimensions. The only thing standing in their way is Joey—or, more precisely, an army of Joeys, all from different dimensions and all determined to save the worlds.   Now Joey must make a choice: return to the life he knows or join the battle to the end.


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<p>The world will end on Saturday. Next Saturday. Just before dinner, according to <em>The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter</em>, Witch, the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies written in 1655. The armies of Good and Evil are amassing and everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except that a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist. </p><p>Put <em>New York Times</em> bestselling authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett together . . . and all Hell breaks loose. </p>


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A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night, taking one of the spectators along with it . . .   In a novella set two years after the events of American Gods, Shadow pays a visit to an ancient Scottish mansion, and finds himself trapped in a game of murder and monsters . . .   In a Hugo Award-winning short story set in a strangely altered Victorian England, the great detective Sherlock Holmes must solve a most unsettling royal murder . . .   Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams—and nightmares . . .   In a Locus Award-winning tale, the members of an excusive epicurean club lament that they've eaten everything that can be eaten, with the exception of a legendary, rare, and exceedingly dangerous Egyptian bird . . .   Such marvelous creations and more—including a short story set in the world of The Matrix, and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children's fiction—can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman's storytelling brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most unique writers of our time.


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<p>"I bought the milk," said my father. "I walked out of the corner shop, and heard a noise like this: t h u m m t h u m m. I looked up and saw a huge silver disc hovering in the air above Marshall Road."</p><p><em>"Hullo,"</em> I said to myself. <em>"That's not something you see every day. And then something odd happened."</em></p><p>Find out just how odd things get in this hilarious <em>New York Times</em> bestselling story of time travel and breakfast cereal, expertly told by Newbery Medalist and bestselling author Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Skottie Young.</p><p>**</p>


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The day after they moved in,  Coraline went exploring.... In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close.The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own.Only it's different.At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter around the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.Other children are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits and all the tools she can find if she is to save the lost children, her ordinary life, and herself.Critically acclaimed and award-winning author Neil Gaiman will delight readers with his first novel for all ages.


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<p class="description">Fat Charlie Nancy is not having a good week. It all hit the proverbial fan when his rotter of an estranged father dropped dead at a karaoke night and Charlie discovered that his dad was in fact Anansi the spider god. Then he found out that he has a brother (called Spider) who is also a god. And that said brother is hell bent on taking over his life, flat and fiance, and, just to add insult to injury, doing a much better job of being him. Desperate to reclaim his life, Charlie enlists the help of four loco old ladies and their unique brand of voodoo and unleashes a bitter and twisted force to get rid of Spider. But as darkness descends and badness begins is Fat Charlie Nancy going to get his life back in one piece or is he about to enter a whole netherworld of pain?</p>


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<p class="description">Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she's been killed in a terrible accident.Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible.He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever he the same...</p>


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Loyal readers of the monthly "Universe" essays in Natural History magazine have long recognized Neil deGrasse Tyson's talent for guiding them through the mysteries of the cosmos with stunning clarity and almost childlike enthusiasm. Here, Tyson compiles his favorite essays across a myriad of cosmic topics. The title essay introduces readers to the physics of black holes by explaining the gory details of what would happen to your body if you fell into one. "Holy Wars" examines the needless friction between science and religion in the context of historical conflicts. "The Search for Life in the Universe" explores astral life from the frontiers of astrobiology. And "Hollywood Nights" assails the movie industry's feeble efforts to get its night skies right.Known for his ability to blend content, accessibility, and humor, Tyson is a natural teacher who simplifies some of the most complex concepts in astrophysics while simultaneously sharing his infectious excitement about our universe.


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<div><p><strong>A brilliant standalone crime novel and prequel to the acclaimed BBC series by the show’s creator and sole writer: “Luther is to crime fiction what his historical counterpart was to religion.…Gripping, taut fiction by a new master in the genre” (Guillermo del Toro).</strong></p><p>Meet Detective Chief Inspector John Luther. He’s a murder detective with an extraordinary case clearance rate. He’s obsessive, instinctive, and intense. Nobody who ever stood at his side has a bad word to say about him. And yet there are rumors that Luther is bad—not corrupt, not on the take, but tormented. He seethes with a hidden fury that at times he can barely control. Sometimes it sends him to the brink of madness, making him do things he shouldn’t—things well beyond the limits of the law.</p></div>


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'Tis done. The world is a most confused and unsteady place -- especially London, center of finance, innovation, and conspiracy -- in the year 1714, when Daniel Waterhouse makes his less-than-triumphant return to England's shores. Aging Puritan and Natural Philosopher, confidant of the high and mighty and contemporary of the most brilliant minds of the age, he has braved the merciless sea and an assault by the infamous pirate Blackbeard to help mend the rift between two adversarial geniuses at a princess's behest. But while much has changed outwardly, the duplicity and danger that once drove Daniel to the American Colonies is still coin of the British realm. No sooner has Daniel set foot on his homeland when he is embroiled in a dark conflict that has been raging in the shadows for decades. It is a secret war between the brilliant, enigmatic Master of the Mint and closet alchemist Isaac Newton and his archnemesis, the insidious counterfeiter Jack the Coiner, a.k.a. Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds. Hostilities are suddenly moving to a new and more volatile level, as Half-Cocked Jack plots a daring assault on the Tower itself, aiming for nothing less than the total corruption of Britain's newborn monetary system. Unbeknownst to all, it is love that set the Coiner on his traitorous course; the desperate need to protect the woman of his heart -- the remarkable Eliza, Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm -- from those who would destroy her should he fail. Meanwhile, Daniel Waterhouse and his Clubb of unlikely cronies comb city and country for clues to the identity of the blackguard who is attempting to blow up Natural Philosophers with Infernal Devices -- as political factions jockey for position while awaiting the impending death of the ailing queen; as the "holy grail" of alchemy, the key to life eternal, tantalizes and continues to elude Isaac Newton, yet is closer than he ever imagined; as the greatest technological innovation in history slowly takes shape in Waterhouse's manufactory. Everything that was will be changed forever ... The System of the World is the concluding volume in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, begun with Quicksilver and continued in The Confusion.


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Zodiac, the brilliant second novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the The Baroque Cycle and Snow Crash, is now available from Grove Press. Meet Sangamon Taylor, a New Age Sam Spade who sports a wet suit instead of a trench coat and prefers Jolt from the can to Scotch on the rocks. He knows about chemical sludge the way he knows about evil—all too intimately. And the toxic trail he follows leads to some high and foul places. Before long Taylor’s house is bombed, his every move followed, he’s adopted by reservation Indians, moves onto the FBI’s most wanted list, makes up with his girlfriend, and plays a starring role in the near-assassination of a presidential candidate. Closing the case with the aid of his burnout roommate, his tofu-eating comrades, three major networks, and a range of unconventional weaponry, Sangamon Taylor pulls off the most startling caper in Boston Harbor since the Tea Party.


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The story of an interactive book, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, written by John Hackworth, a nano engineer. It helps a girl become a princess and educates an army of girls who eventually save his life. The setting is a world where molecular machines create any object desired and where nations have been replaced by cultural enclaves, in this case the neo-Victorians of coastal China. Part-science fiction, part-political thriller.


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In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves -- including one Jack Shaftoe, a.k.a. King of the Vagabonds, a.k.a. Half-Cocked Jack, lately and miraculously cured of the pox -- devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues, rife with battles, chases, hairbreadth escapes, swashbuckling, bloodletting, and danger -- a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver ... nay, gold ... nay, legendary gold that will place the intrepid band at odds with the mighty and the mad, with alchemists, Jesuits, great navies, pirate queens, and vengeful despots across vast oceans and around the globe. Meanwhile, back in Europe ... The exquisite and resourceful Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, master of markets, pawn and confidante of enemy kings, onetime Turkish harem virgin, is stripped of her immense personal fortune by France's most dashing privateer. Penniless and at risk from those who desire either her or her head (or both), she is caught up in a web of international intrigue, even as she desperately seeks the return of her most precious possession -- her child. While ... Newton and Leibniz continue to propound their grand theories as their infamous rivalry intensifies, stubborn alchemy does battle with the natural sciences, nobles are beheaded, dastardly plots are set in motion, coins are newly minted (or not) in enemy strongholds, father and sons reunite in faraway lands, priests rise from the dead ... and Daniel Waterhouse seeks passage to the Massachusetts colony in hopes of escaping the madness into which his world has descended.


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One of Time magazine's 100 all-time best English-language novels.Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous…you’ll recognize it immediately.


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Quicksilver is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight. It is a chronicle of the breathtaking exploits of "Half-Cocked Jack" Shaftoe -- London street urchin turned swashbuckling adventurer and legendary King of the Vagabonds -- risking life and limb for fortune and love while slowly maddening from the pox. And it is the tale of Eliza, rescued by Jack from a Turkish harem to become spy, confidante, and pawn of royals in order to reinvent Europe through the newborn power of finance. A gloriously rich, entertaining, and endlessly inventive novel that brings a remarkable age and its momentous events to vivid life, Quicksilver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most original and important literary talents of our time. And it's just the beginning ...


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<p class="description">This is "the Word" -- one man's word, certainly -- about the art (and artifice) of the state of our computer-centric existence. And considering that the "one man" is Neal Stephenson, "the hacker Hemingway" (Newsweek) -- acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) -- the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present; on operating system tyrannies and downloaded popular revolutions; on the Internet, Disney World, Big Bangs, not to mention the meaning of life itself.</p>


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<div><p>With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. </p><p>In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.</p><p>Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.</p><p>A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon</p></div>


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<p class="description">For ten years Fraa Erasmas, a young avout, has lived in a cloistered sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside world. But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change—and Erasmas will become a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world, as he follows his destiny to the most inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.   Anathem is the latest miraculous invention by the New York Times bestselling author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle—a work of astonishing scope, intelligence, and imagination.</p>


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<p class="description">The Roaring Twenties in New York was a time of exuberant ambition, free-flowing optimism, an explosion of artistic expression in the age of Prohibition. New York was the city that embodied the spirit and strength of a newly powerful America. In 1924, in the vibrant heart of Manhattan, a fierce rivalry was born. Two architects, William Van Alen and Craig Severance (former friends and successful partners, but now bitter adversaries), set out to imprint their individual marks on the greatest canvas in the world--the rapidly evolving skyline of New York City. Each man desired to build the city's tallest building, or 'skyscraper.' Each would stop at nothing to outdo his rival. Van Alen was a creative genius who envisioned a bold, contemporary building that would move beyond the tired architecture of the previous century. By a stroke of good fortune he found a larger-than-life patron in automobile magnate Walter Chrysler, and they set out to build the legendary Chrysler building. Severance, by comparison, was a brilliant businessman, and he tapped his circle of downtown, old-money investors to begin construction on the Manhattan Company Building at 40 Wall Street. From ground-breaking to bricklaying, Van Alen and Severance fought a cunning duel of wills. Each man was forced to revamp his architectural design in an attempt to push higher, to overcome his rival in mid-construction, as the structures rose, floor by floor, in record time. Yet just as the battle was underway, a third party entered the arena and announced plans to build an even larger building. This project would be overseen by one of Chrysler's principal rivals--a representative of the General Motors group--and the building ultimately became known as The Empire State Building. Infused with narrative thrills and perfectly rendered historical and engineering detail,Higherbrings to life a sensational episode in American history. Author Neal Bascomb interweaves characters such as Al Smith and Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, leading up to an astonishing climax that illustrates one of the most ingenious (and secret) architectural achievements of all time.</p>


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<p class="description">The Theocracy has been dead for twenty years, and the Polity rules on Masada. But the Tidy Squad consists of rebels who cannot accept the new order. Their hate for surviving theocrats is undiminished, and the iconic Jeremiah Tombs is at the top of their hit list.Escaping his sanatorium Tombs is pushed into painful confrontation with reality he has avoided since the rebellion. His insanity has been left uncured, because the near mythical hooder called the Technician that attacked him all those years ago, did something to his mind even the AIs fail to understand. Tombs might possess information about the suicide of an entire alien race.The war drone Amistad, whose job it is to bring this information to light, recruits Lief Grant, an ex-rebel Commander, to protect Tombs, along with the black AI Penny Royal, who everyone thought was dead. The amphidapt Chanter, who has studied the bone sculptures the Technician makes with the remains of its prey, might be useful too.Meanwhile, in deep space, the mechanism the Atheter used to reduce themselves to animals, stirs from slumber and begins to power-up its weapons.</p>


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And the Rat Laughed is a unique book. Unlike other Holocaust-related books that focus on the historical horrific events, this novel deals with the act of remembering them. It resembles a relay race in which the characters transfer memory from one another, while travelling on the axis of time. The book begins in the last day of 1999, when a survivor Grandmother in Tel Aviv shares her tragic life story as a hidden child in a pit, with only a rat for company with her granddaughter. The day after 2000 already the granddaughter tells the legend of "Girl and Rat" to her teacher and in 2009 those who heard it through her classmates establish an internet website with poems. From now on this memory is spread all over the world and becomes a myth. In 2099 a future anthropologist discovers it and tries to uncover its mysterious roots. In her research, she reveals the first man who created this myth in the past. Father Stanislaw, a Catholic priest, saved that little Jewish girl (who later became the Grandmother in Tel Aviv) and returned her after the war to her Jewish people. In his personal journal he documented everything, to make sure the world will never forget. The chain of remembearers, therefore, moves from the present to the future and back to the past. The novel is written in 5 genres: story, legend, poems, science fiction and diary, creating a cycle of 150 years. And the Rat Laughed got acclaim for its use of unconventional and original literary devices and became a ground breaker for exploring the act of memory itself. How do we tell our painful story? Does it change while we recall it? How will our next recipient recall it in his own individual way? Is Art the only corridor to transfer emotional memory?


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'The whites want war and we will give it to them.' Sitting Bull * This is the archetypal story of the American West. Whether it is cast as a tale of unmatched bravery in the face of impossible odds or of insane arrogance receiving its rightful comeuppance, Custer's Last Stand continues to captivate the imagination. * Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly reconstructs the build-up to the Battle of the Little Big Horn through to the final eruption of violence. Two legendary figures dominate the events: George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull. No longer the fresh-faced 'Boy-General' of the Civil War, Custer was now mired in financial, professional and political problems. A clear and just cause had been replaced by ambiguity and frustration u by ill-fated efforts at peace treaties, treachery and compromises on both sides. * Forced to take to the plains to feed themselves, and increasingly outraged by the government's policies towards them, the Sioux and Cheyenne became infused with a new sense of collective identity and purpose. Between six and eight thousand people came together in the largest ever gathering of Native Americans. If the government should be foolish enough to pursue them, they would stand and fight. Sitting Bull was in his mid-forties, His charisma and political savvy had enabled him to emerge as their leader. A vision he received during a Sun Dance u of soldiers falling from the sky u was widely understood to presage a great victory. * Nathaniel Philbrick brings vividly to life all those involved u from the Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse and Major Marcus Reno who led the first attack, to Libby Custer waiting with the other army wives at Fort Lincoln. He evokes too the history, geography and haunting beauty of the Great Plains and provides the finest account to date of what happened there u and why u at the end of June 1876.


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<p class="description">No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he complete before his death. Published here in the first new translation in more than fifty years, Kokoro--meaning "heart"-is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls "Sensei". Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">After chronicling the sinking of the whaleship Essex in In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick attempts to rescue from obscurity the U.S. Exploring Expedition's 1838-1842 circumnavigation of the world and its cartographic and scientific accomplishments. With a strong narrative pull but an anticlimactic story arc, he chronicles the six-vessel squadron's Pacific escapades. Instead of a grisly page-turner, however, Philbrick follows his bestselling tragedy with a drawn-out success story. More than a tale of the Ex. Ex's journey, the book also profiles the expedition's egomaniacal commander, Lt. Charles Wilkes; the psychological warfare he waged against his officers; and the near-miraculous survival of the squadron despite Wilkes's perverse leadership and lack of nautical experience. Wilkes was, however, an accomplished surveyor, and the Ex. Ex. mapped hundreds of Pacific islands, 800 miles of the Oregon coast, 100 miles of the Columbia River and 1,500 miles of Antarctic coast. The expedition's scientists made groundbreaking contributions in ethnography, biology and geology (their collections formed the basis of the Smithsonian Institution). Particularly noteworthy among Philbrick's gripping passages are his descriptions of brash navigation in the Antarctic-but too much of the book bogs down in Wilkes's petty politicking, as he degraded talented men and promoted incompetent ones so as not to be outshone. After four years at sea, he had alienated nearly every officer and returned home to a court-martial. "Instead of a thrilling tale of discovery and incredible achievement, [America] heard more about the flawed personality of the Expedition's commander than anyone wanted to know," Philbrick writes of Wilkes's 1842 trial, in which he was acquitted. Unfortunately, this spoils the retelling, too. M</span></h3></div>


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<p class="description">From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound. The Mayflower's religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups - the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall - maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philip's War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them. With towering figures like William Bradford and the distinctly American hero Benjamin Church at the center of his narrative, Philbrick has fashioned a fresh and compelling portrait of the dawn of American history-a history dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion. For sixty-five days, the Mayflower had blundered her way through storms and headwinds, her bottom a shaggy pelt of seaweed and barnacles, her leaky decks spewing salt walter onto her passengers' devoted heads. There were 102 of them - 104 if you counted the two dogs; a spaniel and a giant, slobbery mastiff . They were a most unusual group of colonists. Instead of noblemen, craftsmen, and servants - the types of people who had founded Jamestown in Virginia - these were, for the most part, families; men, women, and children who were willing to endure almost anything if it meant they could worship as they pleased . It was a stunningly audacious proposition. With the exception of Jamestown, all other attempts to establish a permanent English settlement on the North American continent had so far failed. And Jamestown, founded in 1607, could hardly be counted a success . Between 1619 and 1622, the Virginia Company would send close to 3,600 settlers to the colony; over that three-year period, 3,000 would die. In addition to starvation and disease, there was the threat of Indian attack. At the university library in Leiden [the town in Holland where the Puritans had lived] were sensational accounts left by earlier explorers and settlers, telling how the Indians "delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be; flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling on the coals." How could parents willingly subject their children to the risk of such a fate? In the end, all arguments for and against emigrating to America ended with the conviction that God wanted them to go.</p>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">With woody intonation and a suitably somber cadence, Tony Award-winning actor Herrmann reads this chilling tale of the Essex, a whaling ship that was sunk in the middle of the Pacific by an 80-foot sperm whale in 1820. The story would come to mark the mythology of the 19th century as the Titanic did the 20thAHerman Melville, for one, based Moby Dick on certain key elements of the tragedy. In Philbrick's spare, well-paced version, we learn much about how Nantucket's culture was affected by the whaling industry boom, from its economy to its social habits. But the horrific heart of the narrative details the fate of the 20 sailors who attempted to sail several thousand miles back to Chile using only three pathetic open boats. Reaching home 93 days later, only eight sailors survived the ordeal of thirst, starvation and despair. Near the tape's end, Herrmann delivers one of the finest funereal orations ever offered on behalf of seamen. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover (</span></h3>


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<div><p><strong>Nathaniel Philbrick, the bestselling author of<em> In the Heart of the Sea</em> and <em>Mayflower</em>, brings his prodigious talents to the story of the Boston battle that ignited the American Revolution.<br></strong><br>Boston in 1775 is an island city occupied by British troops after a series of incendiary incidents by patriots who range from sober citizens to thuggish vigilantes. After the Boston Tea Party, British and American soldiers and Massachusetts residents  have warily maneuvered around each other until April 19, when violence finally erupts at Lexington and Concord.  In June, however, with the city cut off from supplies by a British blockade and Patriot militia poised in siege, skirmishes give way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It would be the bloodiest battle of the Revolution to come, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists.<br></p><p>Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to every aspect of the story. He finds new characters, and new facets to familiar ones. The real work of choreographing rebellion falls to a thirty-three year old physician named Joseph Warren who emerges as the on-the-ground leader of the Patriot cause and is fated to die at Bunker Hill. Others in the cast include Paul Revere, Warren’s fiancé the poet Mercy Scollay, a newly recruited George Washington, the reluctant British combatant General Thomas Gage and his more bellicose successor William Howe, who leads the three charges at Bunker Hill and presides over the claustrophobic cauldron of a city under siege as both sides play a nervy game of brinkmanship for control.<br></p><p>With passion and insight, Philbrick reconstructs the revolutionary landscape—geographic and ideological—in a mesmerizing narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America.</p></div>


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<div><p>When it first appeared in 1850, <em>The Scarlet Letter</em> enjoyed scandalous success. New England critics condemned its passionate subject matter. One critic complained that Nathaniel Hawthorne invested adultery with all the fascination of genius, and all the charms of a highly polished style. My preliminary chapter, wryly noted the author, has caused the greatest uproar that has happened here since witch-times. <br></p><p>As she emerges from the prison of a Puritan New England town, Hester Prynne defies the dark gloom much as the rose blooms against the prison door. With her illegitimate baby, Pearl, clutched in her arms and the letter Athe mark of an adulteressembroidered in scarlet thread on her breast, Hester holds her head high as she faces the malice and scorn of the townsfolk. Her powerful, bittersweet story is an American classic that continues to touch the hearts of modern readers with its timeless themes of guilt, passion and repentance.</p></div>


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<p>To meet Nate Fick is to walk away encouraged about the future of America. For in this young man, one finds an uncommon mixture of thoughtfulness, intelligence, and drive -- all of which come shining through in his first book, One Bullet Away. In the mid-1990s, Fick was a Dartmouth student with plans for grad school -- big plans that would cost big money. So when he made a calculation and entered the Marine Corps' Officer Candidates School to fund his further education, he was tested within an ounce of his strength in order to stay the course. But several years later, the catastrophic events of 9/11 would send Fick to Afghanistan and later to Iraq, where his hard-core training came in handy, and the throwaway lines he'd heard from instructors, like "There's a fine line between aggressive and foolish," "Don't be in a hurry to get your Marines killed," and "Deal with it," held a new weight -- that of the lives of his fellow soldiers and of the civilians they encountered. Fick is a man with a conscience, too -- one that was tried while he was serving overseas, and one that plagues him still. Reflecting on his experiences as a soldier, he writes, "Philosophical debates were a luxury I could not enjoy. War was what I had. We didn't vote for it, authorize it, or declare it. We just had to fight it." Fight it, he did. (Holiday 2005 Selection)</p>


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THE GOLDEN AGE OF SAIL HAS REURNED--IN THE YEAR 2352 When his mother dies in a flitter crash, eighteen-year-old Ishmael Horatio Wang must find a job with the planet company or leave the system?and NerisCo isn?t hiring. With credits running low, and prospects limited, he has just one hope--to enlist for two years with a deep space commercial freighter. Ishmael, who only rarely visited the Neris Orbital, and has never been off-planet alone before, finds himself part of an eclectic crew sailing a deep space leviathan between the stars. Join the crew of the SC Lois McKendrick, a Manchester built clipper as she sets solar sails in search of profit for her company and a crew each entitled to a share equal to their rating.


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<div><p>These eight powerful stories, dazzling in their display of language and imagination, show a celebrated short-story writer and novelist grappling with the great questions of modern life. <br></p><p>From the title story, a provocative portrait of two marriages inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, to “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums,” two stories that return to the author’s classic themes of sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity, these stories affirm Nathan Englander’s place at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.</p></div>


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From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, Nathan Englander's debut novel The Ministry of Special Cases casts a powerful spell. In the heart of Argentina's Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won't accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander brilliantly captures the grief of a nation.


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List item 2: Never speak German on the upper decks of London buses. Jack Rosenblum is five foot three and a half inches of sheer tenacity. He's writing a list so he can become a Very English Gentleman. List item 41: An Englishman buys his marmalade from Fortnum and Mason. It's 1952, and despite his best efforts, his bid to blend in is fraught with unexpected hurdles - including his wife. Sadie doesn't want to forget where they came from or the family they've lost. And she shows no interest in getting a purple rinse. List item 112: An Englishman keeps his head in a crisis, even when he's risking everything. Jack leads a reluctant Sadie deep into the English countryside in pursuit of a dream. Here, in a land of woolly pigs, bluebells and jitterbug cider, they embark on an impossible task...


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After a young woman inherits a small cornerstone, shes sure the contents will solve all of her problems. Trapped inside is a puca, a mischievous Irish spirit. Once released, the puca only adds to the womans problems. However, things are not what they always seem, and what steps out of the box might be the key to her dreams. Original.


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<div><p>A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows in a playful way that Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them. In this second edition, Taleb has added a new essay,<em> On Robustness and Fragility</em>, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.</p><p><b><br></b></p></div>


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<div><p>Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of <em>The Black Swan</em> and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.<br><br>Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.  <br><br>In <em>The Black Swan, </em>Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In <em>Antifragile,</em> Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. <br><br>Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the <em>Titanic</em> save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear.<br><br><em>Antifragile</em> is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.<br><br>Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.</p></div>


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<p class="description">At fourteen, Alis has never been outside her strict religious community. But when her parents arrange for her to marry a forty-year-old man, she flees desperately to the dangerous, unfamiliar city. She learns quickly that the only way to survive there is to become a thief—or worse. Facing an impossible choice between a forced marriage or life on the streets, Alis seizes control of her own fate. But the path she chooses sets off a disastrous chain of events that leave her accused of murder. Steadfastly loyal, Alis must decide: will she betray a loved one or sacrifice herself?</p>


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Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise to Britain’s defense by taking to the skies . . . not aboard aircraft but atop the mighty backs of fighting dragons.When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes its precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Capt. Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future–and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France’s own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte’s boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire.


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In the first fiction book of the Faithgirlz!TM series, best-selling author Nancy Rue introduces Sophie LaCroix, a creative soul who's destined to become a great film director someday. When her overactive imagination immerses her in the American Revolution after a school field trip, Sophie quickly learns a real-life lesson.  "Excellent for Homeschool Use"


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When some of Sophie's relatives come to town for Thanksgiving and create a whirlwind of sightseeing, including nearby Jamestown, Sophie sees an archeological excavation in progress and pictures herself as a female Indiana Jones.  "Excellent for Homeschool Use"


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<p class="description">Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bandsis an engaging and insightful look into the qualities, attributes, and practices that turn ordinary leaders into extraordinary ones. Nancy Ortberg's unique twist on vision casting; managing tensions; nurturing healthy conflict; motivating those around you; fostering creativity, passion, and trust is unlike anything you've ever read before! At times challenging, at times candid, but always inspiring, Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bandswill bring out the best in even the most seasoned leaders.</p>


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Allow yourself to be drawn into a fantasy world like no other…where a beautiful princess is seduced into a love triangle with a handsome prince and her winsome maid…where a mysterious gentleman's young bride is deliciously disciplined for her unchecked curiosity…where a naive daughter is married off to a beast of a man whose carnal appetites awaken her budding desire…. With a unique and decidedly adult twist on thirteen classic fairy tales, Nancy Madore intrigues and arouses with her titillating, sizzling anthology of erotic stories guaranteed to keep you up late into the night. You'll never look at fairy tales the same way again.


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A young woman stages her own death and flees from her abusive husband to a small Midwestern town where she discovers love and happiness, until her vengeful husband uncovers her secret


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<p class="description">Eat up. Slim down. Itï¿½s just that easy--with just 1,500 delicious calories a day!.From the author of The 1,200-Calorie-a-Day Menu.Cookbook, comes all new recipes for when you are counting calories but donï¿½t want to sacrifice flavor, taste, or variety. While most low-calorie meal plans leave you hungry for more, this cookbook serves up a satisfying selection of energy-boosting breakfasts, fast-fix lunches, and delectable dinners--plus two healthy snacks and one guilt-free dessert--every single day! Itï¿½s.hard to believe itï¿½s just 1,500 calories.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">TV legal analyst Grace's second Hailey Dean thriller (after The Eleventh Victim) works as a zany yet dark satire of pop icon worship. Hailey, a past victim of violent crime, is working as a Manhattan psychologist when a serial killer begins shooting D-List celebrities who are on the verge of making a comeback in their careers, including a TV actress, a reality TV star, a fading film queen, and a singer. After a hit appearance on The Harry Todd Show as a crime expert, Hailey bumps the ratings so high that producer Sookie Downs and her booker, Tony Russo, want her to return as a regular. Hailey is drawn deeper into the shooting investigations by NYPD Lt. Ethan Kolker, who's also wooing her romantically. Grace adds some entertaining wackiness to standard thriller theatrics with some eccentric characters, most notably Francis Merle McGinnis, a goofy star stalker with a connection to the slain D-Listers. </span></h3>

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<p class="description">Nancy Bell returns with another delicious installment in her series of rural Texas mysteries featuring local doyen Biggie Weatherford as amateur detective. Once again, young J.R. faithfully narrates the humorous exploits of Biggie, his grandmother. Filled with plenty of quirky characters and down-home Texas flair, Bell's stories continue to delight. An old friend of Biggie comes back to Job's Crossing. Rex Barnwell and his young wife have returned to convert his father's ranch into a retreat for overweight teenage girls, and Biggie is forced to reveal a secret that she has always kept from J.R. Not long after this startling revelation, Rex is murdered. Knowing full well that he won't be able to keep Biggie away, the Texas Ranger in charge of the case enlists her help.While Biggie pursues her investigation, J.R. has his hands full with troubles of his own. These troubles don't involve any murders-though it might be easier for J.R. if they did. As an extra treat for the reader, Willie Mae shares her recipe for King Ranch Casserole. Biggie is back! Nancy Bell returns with another delicious installment in her series of rural Texas mysteries featuring local doyen Biggie Weatherford as amateur detective. Once again, young J.R. faithfully narrates the humorous exploits of Biggie, his grandmother. Filled with plenty of quirky characters and down-home Texas flair, Bell's stories continue to delight. An old friend of Biggie comes back to Job's Crossing. Rex Barnwell and his young wife have returned to convert his father's ranch into a retreat for overweight teenage girls, and Biggie is forced to reveal a secret that she has always kept from J.R. Not long after this startling revelation, Rex is murdered. Knowing full well that he won't be able to keep Biggie away, the Texas Ranger in charge of the case enlists her help.While Biggie pursues her investigation, J.R. has his hands full with troubles of his own. These troubles don't involve any murders-though it might be easier for J.R. if they did. As an extra treat for the reader, Willie Mae shares her recipe for King Ranch Casserole.</p>


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<div><p>The inside story of the world's most exclusive fraternity; how presidents from Hoover through Obama worked with--and sometimes, against--each other when they were in and out of power.</p></div>


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<p class="description">For years, countless home cooks have shied away from baking their own bread because they were intimidated by all the mess, the experience, and of course, all the kneading required. Now, with Nancy Baggett's revolutionary new Kneadlessly Simple method, even complete novices can bake bread quickly and easily in their own homes, with no kneading and no kitchen mess. The secret is in Baggett's slow-rise method, which allows the yeast to grow slowly and develop the same full, satisfying flavor of traditional bread, without any kneading at all. The technique calls for minimal ingredients, often mixed in one bowl with one spoon, eliminating all the mess of traditional bread recipes, and it can be used to produce a wide variety of breads, from Whole Wheat Boules and English Muffin Loaves to Raisin Bread and Caraway Beer Bread. With this innovative new method, anyone who can read, measure, and stir can now make delicious, fine-textured yeast bread at home. This book will differ from others on the same subject because Nancy Baggett is an experienced food writer who understand home baker's needs. While techniques by other experts may sound similar, they still require messy dough handling. Nancy Baggett's technique is the simplest one yet, and it's virtually fool-proof.</p>


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<p class="description">Throw away that take-out menu and turn to one of the recipes in this wonderful new cookbook. Using readily available ingredients and a few simple techniques, Quick &amp; Easy Chinese brings the delicious flavors of Asia into anyone's kitchen. Included are many familiar restaurant classics like Cashew Chicken, Hot and Sour Soup, and even Fortune Cookies—all simplified for easy home cooking. With a wide range of appetizers, soups, entrees, drinks, and desserts, Quick &amp; Easy Chinese will bring everyone good fortune and good eating.</p>


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<p class="description">Nalini Singh, the NEW YORK TIMES bestselling 'alpha author of paranormal romance' (BOOKLIST), returns to an immortal world of violent passion and lethal power...on the brink of a deadly archangelic war.Angels are falling from the sky in New York, struck down by a vicious, unknown force.Vampires are dying impossibly of disease.Guild hunter Elena Deveraux and the Archangel Raphael must discover the source of the wave of death before it engulfs their city and their people, leaving New York a ruin and Raphael's Tower under siege by enemy archangels.Yet even as they fight desperately to save the city, an even darker force is stirring, its chill eyes trained on New York...and on Raphael. Rivers of crimson and nightmares given flesh, the world will never again be the same...</p>


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<p class="description">Warrior angels, vampire hunters, and angels gone bad heat up this altogether sizzling paranormal alternate universe. This anthology of novellas features Angels' Wolf, Angels' Judgement, Angels' Pawn, and the never-before-published Angels' Dance.</p>


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Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history.--Book cover.


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Who stole the hamster from Room 11? A once-happy class is set on edge in this humorous, highly relatable mystery perfect for middle-grade readers. The day the hamster disappears from Smashie McPerter’s class begins like any other. Well, except for the fact that the teacher is out sick and Smashie’s class is stuck with Mr. Carper, the worst substitute in the world. And except for the mysterious business with the glue. And except for the fact that Smashie is wrestling with a terrible problem, which only partly stems from her extreme aversion to hamster feet. As the peaceable and productive days of Room 11 turn into paranoia-fueled chaos, as natural suspects produce natural alibis and motives remain unmotivated, Smashie and her best friend, Dontel, are forced to the limits of their parlor-room detecting to set things right.


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">In this memoir about growing up the son of deaf parents in 1940s Brooklyn, Uhlberg recalls the time his uncle told him he saw his nephew as cleaved into two parts, half hearing, half deaf, forever joined together. These worlds come together in this work, his first for adults, as Uhlberg, who has written several children's books (including <em>Dad, Jackie, and Me</em>, which won a 2006 Patterson Prize) effortlessly weaves his way through a childhood of trying to interpret the speaking world for his parents while trying to learn the lessons of life from the richly executed Technicolor language of his father's hands. With the interconnection of two different worlds, there is bound to be humor, and Uhlberg is able to laugh at himself and his family's situation. He recounts unsuccessfully trying to reinterpret his teacher's constructive criticism for his parents and finding himself pressed into duty interpreting the Joe Louis prize fights for his dad. There are, of course, more poignant moments, as Uhlberg tries to explain the sound of waves for his curious father or when he finds himself in charge of caring for his epileptic baby brother because his parents can't hear the seizures. As Uhlberg grows up through the polio epidemic, WWII and Jackie Robinson's arrival in Brooklyn, he also grows out of his insecurities about his family and the way they are viewed as outsiders. Instead, looking back, he gives readers a well-crafted, heartwarming tale of family love and understanding. </span></h3>

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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">In a bourgeois apartment building in Paris, we encounter Renée, an intelligent, philosophical, and cultured concierge who masks herself as the stereotypical uneducated “super” to avoid suspicion from the building’s pretentious inhabitants. Also living in the building is Paloma, the adolescent daughter of a parliamentarian, who has decided to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday because she cannot bear to live among the rich. Although they are passing strangers, it is through Renée’s observations and Paloma’s journal entries that The Elegance of the Hedgehog reveals the absurd lives of the wealthy. That is until a Japanese businessman moves into the building and brings the two characters together. A critical success in France, the novel may strike a different chord with some readers in the U.S. The plot thins at moments and is supplanted with philosophical discourse on culture, the ruling class, and the injustices done to the poor, leaving the reader enlightened on Kant but disappointed with the story at hand.</span></h3>


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<p class="description">In Mulk Raj Anand's finest and most controversial novel he conveys precisely, with urgency and barely disguised fury, what it might feel like to be one of India's Untouchables. Bakha is a young man, a proud and even an attractive young man, but none the less he is an outcast in a system that is now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and latrine-cleaner, Anand poured a vitality, fire and richness of detail that have caused him to be acclaimed as his country's Charles Dickens as well as this century's greatest revealer of the 'other' India.</p>


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<div><p>When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's summer rental in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation; a working vacation on a tropical island trumps the library any day. <br></p><p>T.J. Callahan has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost seventeen and if having cancer wasn't bad enough, now he has to spend his first summer in remission with his family - and a stack of overdue assignments - instead of his friends.<br></p><p>Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Adrift in shark-infested waters, their life jackets keep them afloat until they make it to the shore of an uninhabited island. Now Anna and T.J. just want to survive and they must work together to obtain water, food, fire, and shelter. Their basic needs might be met but as the days turn to weeks, and then months, the castaways encounter plenty of other obstacles, including violent tropical storms, the many dangers lurking in the sea, and the possibility that T.J.'s cancer could return. As T.J. celebrates yet another birthday on the island, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man. <br></p><p>"On the Island is a clever, captivating story. The characters will live in your thoughts long after you turn the last page." </p></div>


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<p class="description">Since he was a small boy, Mosab Hassan Yousef has had an inside view of the deadly terrorist group Hamas. The oldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founding member of Hamas and its most popular leader, young Mosab assisted his father for years in his political activities while being groomed to assume his legacy, politics, status . . . and power. But everything changed when Mosab turned away from terror and violence, and embraced instead the teachings of another famous Middle East leader. In Son of Hamas, Mosab Yousef—now called “Joseph”—reveals new information about the world's most dangerous terrorist organization and unveils the truth about his own role, his agonizing separation from family and homeland, the dangerous decision to make his newfound faith public, and his belief that the Christian mandate to “love your enemies” is the only way to peace in the Middle East.</p>


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<p class="description">Amy Curry thinks her life sucks. Her mom decides to move from California to Connecticut to start anew--just in time for Amy's senior year. Her dad recently died in a car accident. So Amy embarks on a road trip to escape from it all, driving cross-country from the home she's always known toward her new life. Joining Amy on the road trip is Roger, the son of Amy's mother's old friend. Amy hasn't seen him in years, and she is less than thrilled to be driving across the country with a guy she barely knows. So she's surprised to find that she is developing a crush on him. At the same time, she's coming to terms with her father's death and how to put her own life back together after the accident. Told in traditional narrative as well as scraps from the road--diner napkins, motel receipts, postcards--this is the story of one girl's journey to find herself.</p>


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<div><p> Lost. That one single word best describes my life at this very moment. I lost the last games of the season and both my team and my coach blame me. I lost the last two months because I drowned in my own despair like a complete loser. And I lost the only girl who ever mattered because I was afraid being with me would destroy her. But now I realize how truly lost I am without her. She has become my story…and even though she acts like she’s moved on, I know she still thinks about me just as much as I think about her. She’s beautiful, sweet—and so damn vulnerable, all I want to do is help her. Be there for her. Love her… If only I could convince Fable to give me a second chance. Then I wouldn’t feel so lost anymore, and neither would she. We could be found together. Forever.</p></div>


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<div><p>Temporary. That one single word best describes my life these last few years. I'm working at a temporary job until I can finally break free. I'm my little brother's temporary mother since our mom doesn't give a crap about either of us. And I'm that temporary girl all the guys want to get with because I give it up so easily. According to the rumors, at least.</p><p>But now I'm the temporary girlfriend of Drew Callahan, college football legend and all around golden guy. He's beautiful, sweet--and he's hiding way more secrets than I am. He's brought me into this fake life where everyone seems to hate me. And everyone seems to want something from him. The only thing he seems to want though is...<br></p><p>Me.<br></p><p>I don't know what to believe anymore. All I know is, I think Drew needs me. And I want to be there for him.</p></div>


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<p class="description">People say that Dr. Taylor Jenkins is the best there is. Devoted to his patients, he has given his life to the hospital. But any free time he has is spent searching out his latest high-adrenaline adventure--and successfully shielding his heart!So now he's in a fix. Not only has he been left in charge of his nephew, he's also been thrown for a loop by the new nurse who's arrived in Santa Fe. Beautiful, talented Piper is a natural with kids, but she's also only temporary. They have one summer and the clock is ticking. The adventure is only just beginning....</p>


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<div><p>When Cassidy Jameson's best friend Tyler took her to Texas with him when he left for college, she was expecting his cousin, their new roommate, to be a Stetson-wearing cowboy since his family owned a ranch; not this incredibly gorgeous guy with a husky Southern drawl that seemed to make the world stop whenever she looked at him. Because of her past, she's only ever trusted two men in her life, Tyler and her dad whom passed away when she was six. But there's something about Gage that draws her to him in a way she can't explain, only problem? He's always telling Tyler that he doesn't want Cassidy living there and sees her as nothing more than his little sister.<br></p><p>Gage Carson was excited his cousin Tyler was coming to live with, and go to college with him. When he'd called to ask if he could bring his friend Cassi with him, Gage didn't care. Gage had heard about this mysterious friend since they were kids and felt like he already knew her. Nothing would prepare him for watching her jump out of Ty's Jeep though. Not only was Cassi the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, but there was something about her that within seconds of meeting her, made Gage want to protect her, and make her his. Too bad Tyler made it a point to remind Gage on a daily basis that he was dating her and she was completely off limits.<br></p><p>For a year and a half, Gage and Cassidy dance around their feelings for each other as Tyler continues to keep them apart; until one day Tyler unknowingly pushes her right into Gage's arms. With Tyler unable to keep lying to them, they finally start a relationship both have been craving since their first meeting. But when an accident and disaster sends her back to Tyler and California, will Cassidy be able to come face to face with the demons from her past to live a life she and Gage deserve; or will the fact that she once again ran to Tyler be the final push that ends Cassidy and Gage for good?</p></div>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">In this account, a journalist traces the course of yellow fever, stopping in 1878 Memphis to "vividly [evoke] the Faulkner-meets-'Dawn of the Dead' horrors,"*-and moving on to today's strain of the killer virus.</span></h3><p>Over the course of history, yellow fever has paralyzed governments, halted commerce, quarantined cities, moved the U.S. capital, and altered the outcome of wars. During a single summer in Memphis alone, it cost more lives than the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, and the Johnstown flood combined.   </p><p>In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, <em>The American Plague</em> depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country-and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism,"<em></em> it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease. </p></div>


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<p class="description">Do you want to eat really well—not just once in a while, but all the time—but you don't know where to begin?   Are you tired of pizza—as much as you like it—and broke from buying takeout?   Do you love good food—the straightforward, homemade kind—but feel challenged to set up a kitchen, shop for decent equipment and groceries, and tap into a few basic skills that can put a simple roast chicken or vegetarian entrÉe on your dinner table?   If you answer "yes" to these questions, then Get Cooking is for you. Get Cooking is the first book from bestselling cookbook author Mollie Katzen designed specifically for beginners, whether you are just starting to cook for yourself or trying to kick the restaurant habit. Unlike most cookbooks, the goal of Get Cooking is to get you in the kitchen, no matter what your experience level might be.   Illustrated throughout with color photographs of each dish, Get Cooking gives you clear, step-by-step instructions for making everything from classic mashed potatoes to Broccoli–Cheddar Cheese Calzones to Hot Fudge Sundaes (with homemade hot fudge!). With this book, anyone—you included—can make delicious, fresh food, with a lot less expense (and a lot more satisfaction) than ordering in.   You may know Mollie Katzen as the author of such famous cookbooks as Moosewood Cookbook or The Enchanted Broccoli Forest; Get Cooking has all of the accessibility and personal warmth of those beloved books, but it is Mollie's first cookbook for vegetarians and omnivores alike. You will learn how to make North African Red Lentil Soup, Linguine with Spinach and Peas, and Chickpea and Mango Curry—and also Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup, Spinach Lasagna, and Steak Fajitas.   With Get Cooking in hand, you'll be serving everything from salads (such as Wilted Spinach Salad with Hazelnuts, Goat Cheese, and Golden Raisins) to desserts (try the Cheesecake Bars), with stops along the way for party snacks, a full array of side dishes, and a brilliant assortment of handcrafted burgers (bean, tofu, and mushroom—as well as beef, turkey, and tuna). Here at last is the cookbook that will make a cook out of everyone.</p>


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Longlisted for the Man Booker PrizeIntrigue and subterfuge combine with misstep and luck in this darkly comic debut about love, betrayal, tyranny, family, and a conspiracy trying its damnedest to happen.Ali Shigri, Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of the Fury Squadron, is on a mission to avenge his father's mysterious death, which was called a suicide by the government. Ali's target is none other than General Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani dictator. Enlisting a rag-tag group of conspirators, including his colognebathed roommate, a hash-smoking American lieutenant, and a mango-besotted crow, Ali sets an elaborate plan in motion. There's only one problem: the line of would-be assassins out for Zia is longer than he could have possibly known.


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<div><p><strong>The debut of a stunning new voice in fiction— a novel both heartbreaking and transcendent </strong></p><p>After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby. </p><p>Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them. </p><p>M. L. Stedman’s mesmerizing, beautifully written novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel’s decision to keep this “gift from God.” And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another’s tragic loss. </p><p><em>The Light Between Oceans </em>is exquisite and unforgettable, a deeply moving novel.</p></div>


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<div><p>On May 13, 1945, twenty-four American servicemen and WACs boarded a transport plane for a sightseeing trip over “Shangri-La,” a beautiful and mysterious valley deep within the jungle-covered mountains of Dutch New Guinea. Unlike the peaceful Tibetan monks of James Hilton’s bestselling novel Lost Horizon, this Shangri-La was home to spear-carrying tribesmen, warriors rumored to be cannibals. </p><p>But the pleasure tour became an unforgettable battle for survival when the plane crashed. Miraculously, three passengers pulled through. Margaret Hastings, barefoot and burned, had no choice but to wear her dead best friend’s shoes. John McCollom, grieving the death of his twin brother also aboard the plane, masked his grief with stoicism. Kenneth Decker, too, was severely burned and suffered a gaping head wound.</p><p>Emotionally devastated, badly injured, and vulnerable to the hidden dangers of the jungle, the trio faced certain death unless they left the crash site. Caught between man-eating headhunters and enemy Japanese, the wounded passengers endured a harrowing hike down the mountainside—a journey into the unknown that would lead them straight into a primitive tribe of superstitious natives who had never before seen a white man—or woman.</p><p>Drawn from interviews, declassified U.S. Army documents, personal photos and mementos, a survivor’s diary, a rescuer’s journal, and original film footage, Lost in Shangri-La recounts this incredible true-life adventure for the first time. Mitchell Zuckoff reveals how the determined trio—dehydrated, sick, and in pain—traversed the dense jungle to find help; how a brave band of paratroopers risked their own lives to save the survivors; and how a cowboy colonel attempted a previously untested rescue mission to get them out.</p><p>By trekking into the New Guinea jungle, visiting remote villages, and rediscovering the crash site, Zuckoff also captures the contemporary natives’ remembrances of the long-ago day when strange creatures fell from the sky. A riveting work of narrative nonfiction that vividly brings to life an odyssey at times terrifying, enlightening, and comic, Lost in Shangri-La is a thrill ride from beginning to end.</p></div>


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<div><p><em>Frozen in Time</em> is a gripping true story of survival, bravery, and honor in the vast Arctic wilderness during World War II, from the author of <em>New York Times </em>bestseller <em>Lost in Shangri-La</em>.</p><p>On November 5, 1942, a US cargo plane slammed into the Greenland Ice Cap. Four days later, the B-17 assigned to the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on board survived, and the US military launched a daring rescue operation. But after picking up one man, the Grumman Duck amphibious plane flew into a severe storm and vanished.</p><p><em>Frozen in Time </em>tells the story of these crashes and the fate of the survivors, bringing vividly to life their battle to endure 148 days of the brutal Arctic winter, until an expedition headed by famed Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen brought them to safety. Mitchell Zuckoff takes the reader deep into the most hostile environment on earth, through hurricane-force winds, vicious blizzards, and subzero temperatures.</p><p>Moving forward to today, he recounts the efforts of the Coast Guard and North South Polar Inc. – led by indefatigable dreamer Lou Sapienza – who worked for years to solve the mystery of the Duck’s last flight and recover the remains of its crew.</p><p>A breathtaking blend of mystery and adventure Mitchell Zuckoff's <em>Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II </em>is also a poignant reminder of the sacrifices of our military personnel and a tribute to the everyday heroism of the US Coast Guard.</p></div>


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<div><p>It touched lives as disparate as those of Frederick Douglass, Franklin Roosevelt, and Mary Todd Lincoln—who once convinced her husband, Abe, to host a séance in the White House. Americans all, they were among the famous figures whose paths intertwined with the mystical and esoteric movement broadly known as the occult. Brought over from the Old World and spread throughout the New by some of the most obscure but gifted men and women of early U.S. history, this “hidden wisdom” transformed the spiritual life of the still-young nation and, through it, much of the Western world.</p><p>Yet the story of the American occult has remained largely untold. Now a leading writer on the subject of alternative spirituality brings it out of the shadows. Here is a rich, fascinating, and colorful history of a religious revolution and an epic of offbeat history.<strong></strong></p><p>From the meaning of the symbols on the one-dollar bill to the origins of the Ouija board_,_ <strong>Occult America </strong>briskly sweeps from the nation’s earliest days to the birth of the New Age era and traces many people and episodes, including:</p><p>•The spirit medium who became America’s first female religious leader in 1776 <br>•The supernatural passions that marked the career of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith <br>•The rural Sunday-school teacher whose clairvoyant visions instigated the dawn of the New Age <br>•The prominence of mind-power mysticism in the black-nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey<br>•The Idaho druggist whose mail-order mystical religion ranked as the eighth-largest faith in the world during the Great Depression </p><p>Here, too, are America’s homegrown religious movements, from transcendentalism to spiritualism to Christian Science to the positive-thinking philosophy that continues to exert such a powerful pull on the public today. A feast for believers in alternative spirituality, an eye-opener for anyone curious about the unknown byroads of American history, <strong>Occult America</strong> is an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose revolutionary influence is still being felt in every corner of the globe. </p></div>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">"We don't often hear stories of NFL cheerleaders who go on to become a Fulbright Scholar and a Ph.D., but Mireya's story is exactly that and more. Pink Boots is the spirited and colorful story of a little Cuban-American girl who refused to let culture and others' expectations of her hold her back. Her passion for the sciences and her adventurous spirit are deeply inspiring and incredibly invigorating. Mireya is beauty and brains personified--and a badass at that. It is a memoir of survival.</span></h3></div>


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<div><p class="description">"Clear some space on your bookshelf for Mitch Albom's, Have a Little Faith, the story of a faith journey that could become a classic. Those who were born into faith, have lost faith, or are still searching will all be engaged and challenged by this powerful story of "finding faith" in relationships with others and with something greater than ourselves. Never satisfied with easy answers or soft platitudes, Mitch explores some of life's greatest mysteries and unanswered questions with great honesty, depth and self reflection. </p><p class="description">What if our beliefs were not what divided us, but what pulled us together? In Have a Little Faith, Mitch Albom offers a beautifully written story of a remarkable eight-year journey between two worlds--two men, two faiths, two communities--that will inspire readers everywhere. Albom's first nonfiction book since Tuesdays with Morrie, Have a Little Faith begins with an unusual request: an eighty-two-year-old rabbi from Albom's old hometown asks him to deliver his eulogy. Feeling unworthy, Albom insists on understanding the man better, which throws him back into a world of faith he'd left years ago. Meanwhile, closer to his current home, Albom becomes involved with a Detroit pastor--a reformed drug dealer and convict--who preaches to the poor and homeless in a decaying church with a hole in its roof. Moving between their worlds, Christian and Jewish, African-American and white, impoverished and well-to-do, Albom observes how these very different men employ faith similarly in fighting for survival: the older, suburban rabbi embracing it as death approaches; the younger, inner-city pastor relying on it to keep himself and his church afloat. As America struggles with hard times and people turn more to their beliefs, Albom and the two men of God explore issues that perplex modern man: how to endure when difficult things happen; what heaven is; intermarriage; forgiveness; doubting God; and the importance of faith in trying times. Although the texts, prayers, and histories are different, Albom begins to recognize a striking unity between the two worlds--and indeed, between beliefs everywhere. In the end, as the rabbi nears death and a harsh winter threatens the pastor's wobbly church, Albom sadly fulfills the rabbi's last request and writes the eulogy. And he finally understands what both men had been teaching all along: the profound comfort of believing in something bigger than yourself. Have a Little Faith is a book about a life's purpose; about losing belief and finding it again; about the divine spark inside us all. It is one man's journey, but it is everyone's story. </p></div>


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<p>Alaska is a place where know-how is currency and a novice's mistakes can kill you. An extreme landscape in both its beauty and challenges, the state is nicknamed "The Last Frontier" with good reason: Here is a paradoxical landscape where boundaries—between community and isolation, bounty and deprivation, conservation and exploitation—are constantly in flux.</p><p>But the state has also always been a place for reinvention, a refuge as much for those desperate to escape something as for those on a quest for something else. In <em>Tide, Feather, Snow</em>, Miranda Weiss, a young woman who grew up landlocked in well-kept East Coast suburbs, moves with her boyfriend to Homer, Alaska, where the days are quartered by the most extreme tides in the country, where the years are marked by seasons of fish, and where locals carry around the knowledge of fish, tides, boats, and weather as ballast. At first, she struggles to make a place for herself in this unfamiliar country. But ultimately, Weiss learns the skills to survive on her own, from setting a fishing net to befriending the locals, from jarring rosehip butter to skinning a sea otter.</p><p>Weiss's keenly observed prose introduces readers to the memorable people and peculiar beauty of Alaska's vast landscape and takes us on her personal journey of adventure, physical challenge, and culture clash. In the tradition of John McPhee's <em>Coming into the Country</em>, this elegant and affecting memoir is nature writing at its best. </p>


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<p class="description">In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.Miranda Carter uses the cousins’ correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men—damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George—and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria—grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third—whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy “arch-vulgarian” who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect.For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.</p>


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Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. In these stories, July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency. A benign encounter, a misunderstanding, a shy revelation can reconfigure the world. Her characters engage awkwardly -- they are sometimes too remote, sometimes too intimate. With great compassion and generosity, July reveals their idiosyncrasies and the odd logic and longing that govern their lives. No One Belongs Here More Than You is a stunning debut, the work of a writer with a spectacularly original and compelling voice.


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<p class="description">Annie, Eve, and their former cooking teacher are in the trenches, trying to keep a new restaurant, Bellywasher's, from going belly up.  Everything's simmering along just fine until Annie and Eve find their friend Sarah, staffer to a powerful congressman, lying dead in her tub. The cops want to write it off as a suicide, but the facts just don't add up. Then, after a series of suspicious "accidents," Annie and Eve realize that this kitchen fire isn't about to put itself out.</p>


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<p class="description">Annie Capshaw has found that the way to a man's heart is through his cooking class. But just as she and her best friend, Eve, are planning Annie's big day with Jim, her former cooking instructor turned boss, murder takes the cake. Make that the wedding cake...</p>


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<p class="description">When Annie leaves the safety of her old bank job to become the full-time manager of her boyfriend's restaurant, what's meant to be the first day of the rest of her life might be the last day of someone else's.</p>


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<p class="description">Cooking class is back in session for best friends-and sometime sleuths-Annie and Eve. But this time, Annie finds herself on the teacher's side of the cutting board, helping out during a bar food cooking class at D.C.'s latest hotspot, Bellywasher's. And her best friend, Eve, is in more hot water than ever-as the prime suspect in a student's murder.</p>


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<p class="description">When Annie Capshaw and her best friend Eve take a gourmet cooking class together, they discover that murder is on the menu when a mysterious man is found dead in the parking lot after arguing with a fellow student, causing this case to come to a boil as they get closer to the truth.</p>


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The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED.Now, twenty years after the Rising, bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives - the dark conspiracy behind the infected. The truth will get out, even if it kills them.


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<p class="description">Ming Neng, entering a retreat to test her karma as a Buddhist nun, becomes trapped between her long-held spiritual quest and forbidden passion when she succumbs to temptation with the young American doctor who saved her life.</p>


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<p>Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck--impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence "Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I'll shut up about it?" <br><br>Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages). If so, you've come to the right book, mostly!<br><br>In <i>Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, </i>Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and...</p>


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<p>In the summer of 1962, nineteen-year-old Mimi Beardsley arrived by train in Washington, D.C., to begin an internship in the White House press office. The Kennedy Administration had reinvigorated the capital and the country—and Mimi was eager to contribute. For a young woman from a privileged but sheltered upbringing, the job was the chance of a lifetime. Although she started as a lowly intern, Mimi made an impression on Kennedy’s inner circle and, after just three days at the White House, she was presented to the President himself.<br><br>Almost immediately, the two began an affair that would continue for the next eighteen months.<br><br>In an era when women in the workplace were still considered “girls,” Mimi was literally a girl herself—naïve, innocent, emotionally unprepared for the thrill that came when the President’s charisma and power were turned on her full-force. She was also unprepared for the feelings of isolation that would follow as she fell into the double life of a college student who was also the secret lover of the most powerful man in the world. Then, after the President’s tragic death in Dallas, she grieved in private, locked her secret away, and tried to start her life anew, only to find that her past would cast a long shadow—and ultimately destroy her relationship with the man she married.<br><br>In 2003, a Kennedy biographer mentioned “a tall, slender, beautiful nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern, who worked in the press office” in reference to one of the President’s affairs. The disclosure set off a tabloid frenzy and soon exposed Mimi and the secret that she had kept for forty-one years. Because her past had been revealed in such a shocking, public way, she was forced, for the first time, to examine the choices she’d made. She came to understand that shutting down one part of her life so completely had closed her off from so much more.<br><br>No longer defined by silence or shame, Mimi Alford has finally unburdened herself with this searingly honest account of her life and her extremely private moments with a very public man. <em>Once Upon a Secret</em> offers a new and personal depiction of one of our most iconic leaders and a powerful, moving story of a woman coming to terms with her past and moving out of the shadows to reclaim the truth.</p>


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<p class="description">When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared from death for a grimmer fate: to perform scientific research on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the infamous Angel of Death: Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele s personal research pathologist. Miraculously, he survived to give this terrifying and sobering account.</p>


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<p class="description">An engrossing literary thriller of intrigue and conspiracy.When Luca Campelli dies a sudden and violent death, his son Jon inherits his second-hand bookshop, Libri di Luca, in Copenhagen. Jon has not seen his father for twenty years since the mysterious death of his mother.When Luca's death is followed by an arson attempt on the shop, Jon is forced to explore his family's past. Unbeknown to Jon, the bookshop has for years been hiding a remarkable secret. It is the meeting place of a society of booklovers and readers who have maintained a tradition of immense power passed down from the days of the great library of ancient Alexandria. Now someone is trying to destroy them, and Jon finds himself in a fight for his life and those of his new friends.</p>


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<p class="description">Moscow, 1929: a city that has lost its way amid corruption and fear, inhabited by people who have abandoned their morals and forsaken spirituality. But when a mysterious stranger arrives in town with a bizarre entourage that includes a giant talking cat and a fanged assassin, all hell breaks loose. Among those caught up in the strange and inexplicable events that transpire in the capital are the Master, a writer whose life has been destroyed by Soviet repression, and his beloved Margarita. Their adventures reveal a story that began two thousand years ago in ancient Jerusalem - and its resolution will decide their fate.</p>


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<div><p>In <em>Programming Your Home</em>, technology enthusiast Mike Riley walks you through a variety of custom home automation projects, ranging from a phone application that alerts you to package deliveries at your front door to an electronic guard dog that will prevent unwanted visitors.<br></p><p>Open locked doors using your smartphone. Assemble a bird feeder that posts Twitter tweets to tell you when the birds are feeding or when bird seed runs low. Have your home speak to you when you receive email or tell you about important events such as the arrival of visitors, and much more!<br></p><p>You'll learn how to use Android smartphones, Arduinos, X10 controllers and a wide array of sensors, servos, programming languages, web frameworks and mobile SDKs. <em>Programming Your Home</em> is written for smartphone programmers, web developers, technology tinkerers, and anyone who enjoys building cutting-edge, Do-It-Yourself electronic projects.<br></p><p>This book will give you the inspiration and understanding to construct amazing automation capabilities that will transform your residence into the smartest home in your neighborhood!<br></p><p><strong>What You Need:</strong><br></p><p>To get the most out of <em>Programming Your Home</em>, you should have some familiarity with the Arduino hardware platform along with a passion for tinkering. You should enjoy innovative thinking and learning exercises as well as have some practical application development experience. The projects use a variety of hardware components including sensors and actuators, mobile devices, and wireless radios, and we'll even tell you where you can get them.</p></div>


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<p>Providing practical advice on home treatments, this accessible guide explains what can be done to relieve symptoms and, if possible, clear up the problem for many common medical conditions. Illustrated with step-by-step photographs, this book's well-rounded approach includes practical techniques, preventive measures, complementary remedies, and conventional medical treatments for use in the home. An integrated approach to health is increasingly popular among doctors and patients, and Home Doctor helps you use all of the information available to treat many common conditions at home. Practical and easy-to-use, it includes over 150 common symptoms, illnesses, and injuries with advice on when you can treat them safely and effectively and when to call a doctor.</p>


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In 1978, the first group of space shuttle astronauts was introduced to the world -- twenty-nine men and six women who would carry NASA through the most tumultuous years of the space shuttle program. Among them was USAF Colonel Mike Mullane, who, in his memoir Riding Rockets, strips the heroic veneer from the astronaut corps and paints them as they are -- human.Mullane's tales of arrested development among military flyboys working with feminist pioneers and post-doc scientists are sometimes bawdy, often comical, and always entertaining. He vividly portrays every aspect of the astronaut experience, from telling a female technician which urine-collection condom size is a fit to hearing "Taps" played over a friend's grave. He is also brutally honest in his criticism of a NASA leadership whose bungling would precipitate the Challenger disaster -- killing four members of his group. A hilarious, heartfelt story of life in all its fateful uncertainty, Riding Rockets will resonate long after the call of "Wheel stop."


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In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands couldn't help but notice that thousands of normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens from every walk of life were caught up in an extraordinary frenzy of buying and selling. The object of this unprecedented speculation was the tulip, a delicate and exotic Eastern import that had bewitched horticulturists, noblemen, and tavern owners alike. For almost a year rare bulbs changed hands for incredible and ever-increasing sums, until single flowers were being sold for more than the cost of a house. Historians would come to call it tulipomania. It was the first futures market in history, and like so many of the ones that would follow, it crashed spectacularly, plunging speculators and investors into economic ruin and despair. This is the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted--and beautiful--commodity in Europe. Historian Mike Dash vividly narrates the story of this amazing flower and the colorful cast of characters--Turkish sultans, Yugoslav soldiers, French botanists, and Dutch tavern keepers--who were centuries apart historically and worlds apart culturally, but who all had one thing in common: tulipomania.


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<p class="description">From the bestselling author ofTulipomaniacomesBatavia's Graveyard, the spellbinding true story of mutiny, shipwreck, murder, and survival. It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's flagship, was loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the Company's fleet, a tangible symbol of the world's richest and most powerful commercial monopoly. She set sail with great fanfare, but the Batavia and her gold would never reach Java, for the Company had also sent along a new employee, Jeronimus Corneliszoon, a bankrupt and disgraced man who possessed disarming charisma and dangerously heretical ideas. With the help of a few disgruntled sailors, Jeronimus soon sparked a mutiny that seemed certain to succeedbut for one unplanned event: In the dark morning hours of June 3, the Batavia smashed through a coral reef and ran aground on a small chain of islands near Australia. The commander of the ship and the skipper evaded the mutineers by escaping in a tiny lifeboat and setting a course for Javasome 1,800 miles northto summon help. Nearly all of the passengers survived the wreck and found themselves trapped on a bleak coral island without water, food, or shelter. Leaderless, unarmed, and unaware of Jeronimus's treachery, they were at the mercy of the mutineers. Jeronimus took control almost immediately, preaching his own twisted version of heresy he'd learned in Holland's secret Anabaptist societies. More than 100 people died at his command in the months that followed. Before long, an all-out war erupted between the mutineers and a small group of soldiers led by Wiebbe Hayes, the one man brave enough to challenge Jeronimus's band of butchers. Unluckily for the mutineers, the Batavia's commander had raised the alarm in Java, and at the height of the violence the Company's gunboats sailed over the horizon. Jeronimus and his mutineers would meet an end almost as gruesome as that of the innocents whose blood had run on the small island they called Batavia's Graveyard. Impeccably researched and beautifully written,Batavia's Graveyardis the next classic of narrative nonfiction, the book that secures Mike Dash's place as one of the finest writers of the genre.</p>


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Mike Dash brings us the story of the Morello family, following the birth of the Mafia in America from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the wharves of New Orleans - where Morello himself disembarked in the United States - to the streets of Little Italy. Using never previously consulted sources, Dash brings to life the remarkable villains and unusual heroes of the Mafia's early years. This gripping account combines the raw violence of the Mafia and the cat-and-mouse of police work with the evocative settings of 19th century rural Sicily and raucous early twentieth century New York. More than just a pulse-quickening Mafia narrative, 'The First Family' is also a groundbreaking study of a particularly crucial period in American history, a period in which the American underworld was born.


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">Solar system astronomer Brown charted a career course to discover Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), which in the 1990s were only theorized to exist beyond Pluto. Ultimately discovering several such frigid spheres, Brown embeds the science of his search strategies into the project’s personal importance in securing his academic future at Cal Tech and, incidentally, in meeting his future wife. In wry, self-deprecating tones, he writes of science, vocation, romance, and fatherhood, with the science as the selling point for readers because Brown’s success in discovering KBOs set the stage for Pluto’s recent reclassification as a mere KBO. Accounts of finding specific KBOs culminate in an acrimonious engagement Brown had with a Spanish astronomer, whom Brown suspected of stealing data in order to claim priority in discovering one KBO. Scandal! Touching on how media refract such scientific conflicts to the public, Brown concludes with the professional astronomers’ vote to expel Pluto from the club of planets, a decision that has already inspired several other titles (e.g., Barrie Jones’ Pluto, 2010). </span></h3>


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<p class="description">Hello, I am Mike Birbiglia and I want you to read my book. Too on the nose? Sorry. Let me dial it back. I’m Mike Birbiglia and I’m a comedian. You may know me from Comedy Central or This American Life or The Bob &amp; Tom Show, but you’ve never seen me like this before. Naked. Wait, that’s the name of another book. Also I’m not naked as there are no pictures in my book. Also, if there were naked pictures of me, you definitely wouldn’t buy it, though you might sneak a copy into the back corner of the bookstore and show it to your friend and laugh. Okay, let’s get off the naked stuff. This is my first book. It’s difficult to describe. It’s a comedic memoir, but I’m only 32 years old so I’d hate for you to think I’m “wrapping it up,” so to speak. But I tell some personal stories. Some REALLY personal stories. Stories that I considered not publishing time and time again, especially when my father said, “Michael, you might want to stay away from the per­sonal stuff.” I said, “Dad, just read the dedication.” (Which I’m telling you to do too.) Some of the stories are about my childhood, some are about girls I made out with when I was thirteen, some are about my parents, and some are, of course, about my bouts with sleepwalking. Bring this book to bed. And sleepwalk with me.</p>


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<p>Based on the hit website, AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com (“painful, regrettable, horrifyingly awesome snaps of family bonding, you will laugh so hard that people in adjoining offices will ask what’s wrong with you”—<em>Esquire</em>), this full color book features never-before-seen photos and hilarious personal stories covering everything from uncomfortable moments with relatives, teen angst, sibling rivalry, and family vacations from hell. Cringe at the forced poses, bad hair, and matching outfits--all prompting us to look at our own families and celebrate the fact that we're not alone. Nothing says awkward better than an uncomfortable family photograph!</p>


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<div><p>Two of America's most perceptive political reporters join forces for an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the race for the White House in POLITICO's Playbook 2012, a series of four instant digital books on the 2012 presidential election. The first edition, The Right Fights Back, follows the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.</p><p>The battle for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination promises to be one of the most hotly contested and closely fought in recent memory, as establishment Republicans, Tea Party favorites, and dark horse insurgents vie to take on President Obama in the November election. In The Right Fights Back, Mike Allen, chief White House correspondent for POLITICO, and Evan Thomas, the award-winning journalist and author of Robert F. Kennedy and The War Lovers, chronicle the dramatic events of this historic campaign as it unfolds.</p><p>With exclusive real-time reporting from the campaign trail, The Right Fights Back provides detail, color, and in-depth analysis that take readers beyond the hourly headlines and commentary. From the role of Super PACS and conservative interest groups to the clashes of personality and policy that will define the race to capture the GOP nomination, this is a history-as-it-happens account of the resurgent American right at the crossroads. </p></div>


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<p class="description">Mika Brzezinski is at war against obesity. On Morning Joe, she is often so adamant about improving America’s eating habits that some people have dubbed her “the food Nazi.” What they don’t know is that Mika wages a personal fight against unhealthy eating habits every day, and in this book she describes her history of food obsession and distorted body image, and her lifelong struggle to be thin. She believes it’s time we all learned to stop blaming ourselves, and each other, and look at the real culprits—the food we eat and our addiction to it. Mika feels the only way to do this is to break through the walls of silence and shame we’ve built around obesity and food obsessions. She believes we need to talk openly about how our country became overweight, and what we can do to turn the corner and step firmly onto the path of health. So Mika made a deal with her very close friend Diane: they would work together on this book and on their personal goals, to help Diane drop 75 pounds and to break Mika’s obsession with staying superthin.   As she did in her bestseller Knowing Your Value, Mika has packed each chapter with insights from notable people in medicine, health, business, the arts, and politics. Singer Jennifer Hudson, the late writer and director Nora Ephron, TV host Gayle King, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and many others open up to Mika about their own challenges and what works for them when it comes to food and diet. It’s time we stopped whispering the F-word (“fat”) the way we used to shun the C-word (“cancer”).   This book—with its trademark Brzezinski smarts, honesty, and courage—launches us into a no-holds-barred conversation with family and friends, in schools and kitchens, in Congress and the food industry, to help us all find ways to tackle one of the biggest problems standing between us and a healthier America.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; ">In psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's definition of leadership, the personal is political. The best-selling author of __ interviewed several dozen exemplary CEOs whose wisdom provides the radical job description of the book’s premise: "Leaders must make it possible for employees to work with joy, to their heart’s content, while responding to the needs of society." Csikszentmihalyi leverages his definition of "flow"—-the capacity for full engagement in an activity—-to create a blueprint for a workplace in which bringing out the best in workers comes before products and profit. When leaders select and reward employees who find satisfaction at work, they can create an upwardly moral organization.</span></h3><p>In this view, leadership is a privilege that requires checking ego in the coatroom and peering into the mirror to ask tough questions. For example, "How do I determine if something is right or wrong?" Or, "What is my business doing to benefit human well being?" He offers some inspiring stories from leaders who engage employees to go with the flow, including Body Shop CEO Anita Roddick, Patagonia crown prince Yvon Chouinard, and media mogul Ted Turner. Some of Csikszentmihalyi’s advice will sound familiar. Yet he creates a compellingly fresh vision of good business in both a material and spiritual sense. Ultimately, the success of this book lies in its powerful, non-flaky ability to define corporate soul in terms of a company becoming a stakeholder in an entity larger than itself.</p></div>


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<p>Creativity is about capturing those moments that make life worth living. The author's objective is to offer an understanding of what leads to these moments, be it the excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab, so that knowledge can be used to enrich people's lives. Drawing on 100 interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists to politicians and business leaders, poets and artists, as well as his 30 years of research on the subject, Csikszentmihalyi uses his famous theory to explore the creative process. He discusses such ideas as why creative individuals are often seen as selfish and arrogant, and why the tortured genius is largely a myth. Most important, he clearly explains why creativity needs to be cultivated and is necessary for the future of our country, if not the world. </p>


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<p class="description">Garnering international prizes and acclaim before its publication, Ilustrado has been called “brilliantly conceived and stylishly executed . . .It is also ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy, and effervescent with humor” (2008 Man Asian Literary Prize panel of judges).It begins with a body. On a clear day in winter, the battered corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled from the Hudson River—taken from the world is the controversial lion of Philippine literature. Gone, too, is the only manuscript of his final book, a work meant to rescue him from obscurity by exposing the crimes of the Filipino ruling families. Miguel, his student and only remaining friend, sets out for Manila to investigate. To understand the death, Miguel scours the life, piecing together Salvador’s story through his poetry, interviews, novels, polemics, and memoirs. The result is a rich and dramatic family saga of four generations, tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, the Americans, and the Filipinos themselves. Finally, we are surprised to learn that this story belongs to young Miguel as much as to his lost mentor, and we are treated to an unhindered view of a society caught between reckless decay and hopeful progress.Exuberant and wise, wildly funny and deeply moving, Ilustrado explores the hidden truths that haunt every family. </p>


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<p class="description">When Kate McBride returns to her hometown of Bishop's Bridge, North Carolina, for a family reunion, she expects questions about her husband's conspicuous absence. What she doesn't expect is murder.Soon after arriving, Kate finds her great uncle's housekeeper, Ella Stegall, badly injured and incoherent, at the bottom of a wooded ravine after an apparent fall from a ledge. But moments before losing consciousness, Ella whispers she was pushed--not surprising, considering that Bramblewood, Uncle Ernest's woodsy estate, is no stranger to murder and intrigue.Could Ella's accident be connected to Bramblewood's mysterious past, or was her claim just the rambling of a delirious old woman? Poor Ella slips away before leaving more clues to her death.Now Kate must come to terms with disturbing doubts about close family members while coping with her troubled young daughter. Luckily for Kate, guardian angel Augusta Goodnight has dropped by to help, this time with a bumbling young apprentice in tow. With fresh baked goods and sound, heavenly advice, Augusta helps Kate investigate Ella's untimely demise--and a few other unsolved mysteries along the way. When Kate McBride returns to her hometown of Bishop's Bridge, North Carolina, for a family reunion, she expects questions about her husband's conspicuous absence. What she doesn't expect is murder.Soon after arriving, Kate finds her great uncle's housekeeper, Ella Stegall, badly injured and incoherent, at the bottom of a wooded ravine after an apparent fall from a ledge. But moments before losing consciousness, Ella whispers she was pushed--not surprising, considering that Bramblewood, Uncle Ernest's woodsy estate, is no stranger to murder and intrigue.Could Ella's accident be connected to Bramblewood's mysterious past, or was her claim just the rambling of a delirious old woman? Poor Ella slips away before leaving more clues to her death.Now Kate must come to terms with disturbing doubts about close family members while coping with her troubled young daughter. Luckily for Kate, guardian angel Augusta Goodnight has dropped by to help, this time with a bumbling young apprentice in tow. With fresh baked goods and sound, heavenly advice, Augusta helps Kate investigate Ella's untimely demise--and a few other unsolved mysteries along the way.</p>


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<p class="description">After the sudden death of her husband, Minda Hobbs returns to Angel Heights, S.C., the home of her forebears, to seek peace and purpose in her life. Instead, she finds her n'er-do-well cousin Otto as cold and stiff as yesterday's grits in the ladies' room at the historic Minerva Academy. Shocked by her cousin's murder and still grieving over the loss of her husband, Minda has mixed emotions when she's greeted by her guardian angel, Augusta Goodnight. Shimmering with church window radiance, and smelling of strawberry jam, Augusta is a temp who's come on a double mission-to help Minda solve Otto's murder and to take care of unfinished business from an assignment in 1916. Even though Otto could be unbearable at times, an annoying laugh is hardly cause for murder. Minda's only lead is a tiny gold pin, found wedged in a Minerva Academy bathroom stall, and its connection to a club called the Mystic Six. Together, Minda and Augusta trace the descendents of this secret society, piecing together clues that lead to a special quilt and the mystery behind Cousin Otto's unfortunate demise.</p>


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<p class="description">Imagine, if you can, the world in the year 2100.In Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku—the New York Times bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible—gives us a stunning, provocative, and exhilarating vision of the coming century based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists who are already inventing the future in their labs. The result is the most authoritative and scientifically accurate description of the revolutionary developments taking place in medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production, and astronautics.In all likelihood, by 2100 we will control computers via tiny brain sensors and, like magicians, move objects around with the power of our minds. Artificial intelligence will be dispersed throughout the environment, and Internet-enabled contact lenses will allow us to access the world's information base or conjure up any image we desire in the blink of an eye.Meanwhile, cars will drive themselves using GPS, and if room-temperature superconductors are discovered, vehicles will effortlessly fly on a cushion of air, coasting on powerful magnetic fields and ushering in the age of magnetism.Using molecular medicine, scientists will be able to grow almost every organ of the body and cure genetic diseases. Millions of tiny DNA sensors and nanoparticles patrolling our blood cells will silently scan our bodies for the first sign of illness, while rapid advances in genetic research will enable us to slow down or maybe even reverse the aging process, allowing human life spans to increase dramatically.In space, radically new ships—needle-sized vessels using laser propulsion—could replace the expensive chemical rockets of today and perhaps visit nearby stars. Advances in nanotechnology may lead to the fabled space elevator, which would propel humans hundreds of miles above the earth’s atmosphere at the push of a button.But these astonishing revelations are only the tip of the iceberg. Kaku also discusses emotional robots, antimatter rockets, X-ray vision, and the ability to create new life-forms, and he considers the development of the world economy. He addresses the key questions: Who are the winner and losers of the future? Who will have jobs, and which nations will prosper?All the while, Kaku illuminates the rigorous scientific principles, examining the rate at which certain technologies are likely to mature, how far they can advance, and what their ultimate limitations and hazards are. Synthesizing a vast amount of information to construct an exciting look at the years leading up to 2100, Physics of the Future is a thrilling, wondrous ride through the next 100 years of breathtaking scientific revolution.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">Michelle Williams is young and attractive, with close family ties, a busy social life . . . and an unusual occupation. When she impulsively applies to be a mortuary technician and is offered the position, she has no idea that her decision to accept will be one of the most momentous of her life. “What I didn’t realize then,” she writes, “was that I was about to start one of the most amazing jobs you can do.”</span></h3><p>To Williams, life in the mortuary is neither grim nor frightening. She introduces readers to a host of unique characters: pathologists (many eccentric, some utterly crazy), undertakers, and the man from the coroner’s office who sings to her every morning. No two days are alike, and while Williams’s sensitivity to the dead never wavers, her tales from the crypt range from mischievous to downright shocking. Readers won’t forget the fitness fanatic run over while doing nighttime push-ups on the road, the man so large he had to be carted in via refrigerated truck, or the guide dog who led his owner onto railway tracks—and left him there. The indomitable Williams never bats an eye, even as she is confronted—daily—with situations that would leave the rest of us speechless.</p></div>


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In ancient Egypt, a forgotten princess must overcome her family’s past and remake history.The winds of change are blowing through Thebes. A devastating palace fire has killed the Eighteenth Dynasty’s royal family—all with the exception of Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen, Nefertiti. The girl’s deceased family has been branded as heretical, and no one in Egypt will speak their names. A relic of a previous reign, Nefertari is pushed aside, an unimportant princess left to run wild in the palace. But this changes when she is taken under the wing of the Pharaoh’s aunt, then brought to the Temple of Hathor, where she is educated in a manner befitting a future queen.Soon Nefertari catches the eye of the Crown Prince, and despite her family’s history, they fall in love and wish to marry. Yet all of Egypt opposes this union between the rising star of a new dynasty and the fading star of an old, heretical one. While political adversity sets the country on edge, Nefertari becomes the wife of Ramesses the Great. Destined to be the most powerful Pharaoh in Egypt, he is also the man who must confront the most famous exodus in history.Sweeping in scope and meticulous in detail, The Heretic Queen is a novel of passion and power, heartbreak and redemption.


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A National Bestseller!“Meticulously researched and richly detailed . . . an engrossing tribute to one of the most powerful and alluring women in history.” –Boston GlobeNefertiti and her younger sister, Mutnodjmet, have been raised in a powerful family that has provided wives to the rulers of Egypt for centuries. Ambitious, charismatic, and beautiful, Nefertiti is destined to marry Amunhotep, an unstable young pharaoh. It is hoped that her strong personality will temper the young ruler’s heretical desire to forsake Egypt’s ancient gods.From the moment of her arrival in Thebes, Nefertiti is beloved by the people but fails to see that powerful priests are plotting against her husband’s rule. The only person brave enough to warn the queen is her younger sister, yet remaining loyal to Nefertiti will force Mutnodjmet into a dangerous political game; one that could cost her everything she holds dear.


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The marriage of Marc Antony and Cleopatra is one of the greatest love stories of all time, a tale of unbridled passion with earth-shaking political consequences. Feared and hunted by the powers in Rome, the lovers choose to die by their own hands as the triumphant armies of Antony’s revengeful rival, Octavian, sweep into Egypt. Their three orphaned children are taken in chains to Rome; only two– the ten-year-old twins Selene and Alexander–survive the journey. Delivered to the household of Octavian’s sister, the siblings cling to each other and to the hope that they will return one day to their rightful place on the throne of Egypt. As they come of age, they are buffeted by the personal ambitions of Octavian’s family and court, by the ever-present threat of slave rebellion, and by the longings and desires deep within their own hearts. The fateful tale of Selene and Alexander is brought brilliantly to life in Cleopatra’s Daughter. Recounted in Selene’s youthful and engaging voice, it introduces a compelling cast of historical characters: Octavia, the emperor Octavian’s kind and compassionate sister, abandoned by Marc Antony for Cleopatra; Livia, Octavian's bitter and jealous wife; Marcellus, Octavian’s handsome, flirtatious nephew and heir apparent; Tiberius, Livia’s sardonic son and Marcellus’s great rival for power; and Juba, Octavian’s watchful aide, whose honored position at court has far-reaching effects on the lives of the young Egyptian royals. Selene’s narrative is animated by the concerns of a young girl in any time and place–the possibility of finding love, the pull of friendship and family, and the pursuit of her unique interests and talents. While coping with the loss of both her family and her ancestral kingdom, Selene must find a path around the dangers of a foreign land. Her accounts of life in Rome are filled with historical details that vividly capture both the glories and horrors of the times. She dines with the empire’s most illustrious poets and politicians, witnesses the creation of the Pantheon, and navigates the colorful, crowded marketplaces of the city where Roman-style justice is meted out with merciless authority. Based on meticulous research, Cleopatra’s Daughter is a fascinating portrait of imperial Rome and of the people and events of this glorious and most tumultuous period in human history. Emerging from the shadows of the past, Selene, a young woman of irresistible charm and preternatural intelligence, will capture your heart.


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<div><p><strong>Mara Dyer doesn’t know if she is crazy or haunted—all she knows is that everyone around her is dying in this suspenseful and “strong, inventive tale” (<em>Kirkus Reviews)</em>.</strong></p><p>Mara Dyer doesn’t think life can get any stranger than waking up in a hospital with no memory of how she got there.</p><p>It can.</p><p>She believes there must be more to the accident she can’t remember that killed her friends and left her mysteriously unharmed.</p><p>There is.</p><p>She doesn’t believe that after everything she’s been through, she can fall in love.</p><p>She’s wrong.</p><p>After Mara survives the traumatizing accident at the old asylum, it makes sense that she has issues. She lost her best friend, her boyfriend, and her boyfriend’s sister, and as if that weren’t enough to cope with, her family moves to a new state in order to give her a fresh start. But that fresh start is quickly filled with hallucinations—or are they premonitions?—and then corpses, and the boundary between reality and nightmare is wavering. At school, there’s Noah, a devastatingly handsome charmer who seems determined to help Mara piece together what’s real, what’s imagined—and what’s very, very dangerous.</p><p>This fast-paced psychological—or is it paranormal?—thriller will leave you breathless.</p></div>


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<div><p><strong>The truth about Mara Dyer’s dangerous and mysterious abilities continues to unravel in this gripping sequel to the thrilling <em>The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer</em>. </strong></p><p>Mara Dyer once believed she could run from her past.</p><p>She can’t.</p><p>She used to think her problems were all in her head.</p><p>They aren’t.</p><p>She couldn’t imagine that after everything she’s been through, the boy she loves would still be keeping secrets.</p><p>She’s wrong.</p><p>In this gripping sequel to <em>The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer</em>, the truth evolves and choices prove deadly. What will become of Mara Dyer next?</p></div>


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<p class="description">Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole. --FROM THE NEW JIM CROW As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them. In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.</p>


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<div><p class="description">#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER</p><p class="description">From a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. </p><p class="description">Michael Moss reveals how companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more important, how we can fight back. </p><p class="description">In the spring of 1999 the heads of the world’s largest processed food companies—from Coca-Cola to Nabisco—gathered at Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis for a secret meeting. On the agenda: the emerging epidemic of obesity, and what to do about it.   Increasingly, the salt-, sugar-, and fat-laden foods these companies produced were being linked to obesity, and a concerned Kraft executive took the stage to issue a warning: There would be a day of reckoning unless changes were made. This executive then launched into a damning PowerPoint presentation—114 slides in all—making the case that processed food companies could not afford to sit by, idle, as children grew sick and class-action lawyers lurked. To deny the problem, he said, is to court disaster.   When he was done, the most powerful person in the room—the CEO of General Mills—stood up to speak, clearly annoyed. And by the time he sat down, the meeting was over.   Since that day, with the industry in pursuit of its win-at-all-costs strategy, the situation has only grown more dire. Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year.   In Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how we got here. Featuring examples from some of the most recognizable (and profitable) companies and brands of the last half century—including Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestlé, Oreos, Cargill, Capri Sun, and many more—Moss’s explosive, empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, often eye-opening research.   Moss takes us inside the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology to calculate the “bliss point” of sugary beverages or enhance the “mouthfeel” of fat by manipulating its chemical structure. He unearths marketing campaigns designed—in a technique adapted from tobacco companies—to redirect concerns about the health risks of their products: Dial back on one ingredient, pump up the other two, and tout the new line as “fat-free” or “low-salt.” He talks to concerned executives who confess that they could never produce truly healthy alternatives to their products even if serious regulation became a reality. Simply put: The industry itself would cease to exist without salt, sugar, and fat. Just as millions of “heavy users”—as the companies refer to their most ardent customers—are addicted to this seductive trio, so too are the companies that peddle them. You will never look at a nutrition label the same way again.“As a feat of reporting and a public service, Salt Sugar Fat is a remarkable accomplishment.”—The New York Times Book Review</p></div>


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<p class="description">When lightning strikes, lives are changed. BECCA On a sunny day in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight-year-old Becca Burke was struck by lightning. No one believed her—not her philandering father or her drunk, love-sick mother—not even when her watch kept losing time and a spooky halo of light appeared overhead in photographs. Becca was struck again when she was sixteen. She survived, but over time she would learn that outsmarting lightning was the least of her concerns. BUCKLEY In rural Arkansas, Buckley R. Pitank’s world seemed plagued by disaster. Ashamed but protective of his obese mother, fearful of his scathing grandmother, and always running from bullies (including his pseudo-evangelical stepfather), he needed a miracle to set him free. At thirteen years old, Buckley witnessed a lightning strike that would change everything. Now an art student in New York City, Becca Burke is a gifted but tortured painter who strives to recapture the intensity of her lightning-strike memories on canvas. On the night of her first gallery opening, a stranger appears and is captivated by her art. Who is this odd young man with whom she shares a mysterious connection? When Buckley and Becca finally meet, neither is prepared for the charge of emotions—or for the perilous event that will bring them even closer to one another, and to the families they’ve been running from for as long as they can remember. Crackling with atmosphere and eccentric characters, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors explores the magic of nature and the power of redemption in a novel as beautiful and unpredictable as lightning itself.</p>


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At the heart of this panoramic, multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Faber leads readers back to 1870s London, where Sugar, a 19-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for escape to a better life.


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; "><strong>The untold story of how America's Progressive-era war on smallpox sparked one of the great civil liberties battles of the twentieth century.</strong></span></h3><p>At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern tobacco plantations to the dense immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the nascent American empire. In <em>Pox</em>, award-winning historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continentwide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the twentieth century.   </p><p>At the dawn of the activist Progressive era and during a moment of great optimism about modern medicine, the government responded to the deadly epidemic by calling for universal compulsory vaccination. To enforce the law, public health authorities relied on quarantines, pesthouses, and "virus squads"-corps of doctors and club-wielding police. Though these measures eventually contained the disease, they also sparked a wave of popular resistance among Americans who perceived them as a threat to their health and to their rights.   </p><p>At the time, anti-vaccinationists were often dismissed as misguided cranks, but Willrich argues that they belonged to a wider legacy of American dissent that attended the rise of an increasingly powerful government. While a well-organized anti-vaccination movement sprang up during these years, many Americans resisted in subtler ways-by concealing sick family members or forging immunization certificates. <em>Pox</em> introduces us to memorable characters on both sides of the debate, from Henning Jacobson, a Swedish Lutheran minister whose battle against vaccination went all the way to the Supreme Court, to C. P. Wertenbaker, a federal surgeon who saw himself as a medical missionary combating a deadly-and preventable-disease.   </p><p>As Willrich suggests, many of the questions first raised by the Progressive-era antivaccination movement are still with us: How far should the government go to protect us from peril? What happens when the interests of public health collide with religious beliefs and personal conscience? In <em>Pox</em>, Willrich delivers a riveting tale about the clash of modern medicine, civil liberties, and government power at the turn of the last century that resonates powerfully today. </p>

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<div><p><strong>Countdown To Armageddon</strong></p><p>It begins in California with a devastating biological attack--a horrific display of homegrown terror unseen on U.S. soil--just weeks before the presidential election. For the White House, it is a political nightmare, as it threatens to plunge the country into panic and economic chaos. But for the NSA's undercover agent Devlin, it is the ultimate warning. Devlin knows who's behind the mayhem. He knows who controls the media. And he knows that, unless he can stop it, the End of Days begins. . .on Election Day.</p></div>


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In the wake of the most horrific act of terrorism ever committed on American soil, covert NSA agent realizes that someone is trying to force him to reveal himself by targeting innocent citizens. By the best-selling author of As Time Goes By. Original.


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; "><strong>In folklore, the real David Crockett, American frontiersman and cultural icon, finally emerges in this engrossing biography.</strong></span></h3><p>His name was David Crockett. He never signed his name any other way, but popular culture transformed his memory into "Davy Crockett," and Hollywood gave him a raccoon hat he hardly ever wore. Best-selling historian Michael Wallis casts a fresh look at the frontiersman, storyteller, and politician behind these legendary stories. Born into a humble Tennessee family in 1786, Crockett never "killed him a b'ar" when he was only three. But he did cut a huge swath across early-nineteenth-century America—as a bear hunter, a frontier explorer, a soldier serving under Andrew Jackson, an unlikely congressman, and, finally, a martyr in his now-controversial death at the Alamo. Wallis's <em>David Crockett</em> is more than a riveting story. It is a revelatory, authoritative biography that separates fact from fiction, providing us with an extraordinary evocation of a true American hero and the rough-and-tumble times in which he lived. 60 black-and-white illustrations </p></div>


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Not since Jack Reacher has there been such a quickthinking, hard-edged antihero who readers will root for against all odds All recovering drug addict and reformed thief Montgomery Haaviko wants to do is settle down with his wife and baby in their new home and work on building a straight life, one free of the day-to-day hustle and danger of being a career criminal. But for a man who’s never held down a legitimate job it isn’t going to be easy. When Monty foils a robbery in his new home, killing the intruders, he soon finds he has both a small-time crime boss and a star police sergeant looking for ways to ruin him, run him out of town, or kill him. It’s going to take all of the tricks this streetwise ex-con has up his sleeves to prove his innocence, protect his family, and avoid the temptation of the life he left behind. Montgomery Haaviko’s Tricks of the Trade: • Be nice. Nice is good. Nice sets a standard. Then, when you get mean, the shock is strongest. • Armored cars are owned by people with guns. • When burglarizing a house move slowly. Then slow down. Now cut it by half. And you’ve got it. • A couple of drops of crazy glue on the tips of your fingers will eliminate fingerprints.


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The Football Fan's Ten Commandments   You Must Choose Your Team by the Age of Eight. Value That Team Above All Else, Even Yourself.  Under No Circumstances Can You Switch Teams (And Expect to Live). There is a Limit to the Amount of Merchandise You Can Own (But It's Very Generous). Sportsmanship is for the Athletes. Fans Can Gloat Endlessly. A Self-Induced Coma to Skip the Off-season is a Practical Solution to an Annoying Problem. An Inoffensive Fantasy Football Name is a Lame Fantasy Football Name. Wealth Doesn't Matter So Long As You Don't Have to Work Weekends.  Respect Superstitions. If Your Team Lost, It's Because You Jinxed Them.  In Life, the Order of Importance: Football First, Football Second, Football Third, Family . . . uh, I Don't Know, twelfth?   These are just the basics if you wish to be a True Football Fan. The full picture is much more complex and boozy. Thankfully, The Football Fan's Manifesto is your very own playbook to the strict rules and bylaws that must be scrupulously observed. After all, trash-talking is an intricate science and running onto the field a dangerous but irresistible pursuit. There are many lessons to be learned, especially that choosing a favorite team to live and die with is not a choice made easily: It's the most important decision of your life!


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<p>Science fiction and fantasy's most adept short-story author reinvents some classic themes in an engaging collection that includes three of his Hugo awardwinning stories. These smart expansions of traditional themes summon dinosaurs, dragons, peril in space, myths, faeries, and time travel, each undergoing artful alchemy to create serious genre literature that is playful, original, and clever. Comprising 16 imaginative and mischievous adventures, including the previously unpublished novelette, <em>The Skysailor's Tale, </em>this adroit gathering makes a collection to truly revel in.</p>


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<p class="description">In this provocative and headline- making book, Michael Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its terrible toll on individuals and the planet. In Denialism, New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter reveals that Americans have come to mistrust institutions and especially the institution of science more today than ever before. For centuries, the general view had been that science is neither good nor bad-that it merely supplies information and that new information is always beneficial. Now, science is viewed as a political constituency that isn't always in our best interest. We live in a world where the leaders of African nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather than import genetically modified grains. Childhood vaccines have proven to be the most effective public health measure in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their use. In the United States a growing series of studies show that dietary supplements and "natural" cures have almost no value, and often cause harm. We still spend billions of dollars on them. In hundreds of the best universities in the world, laboratories are anonymous, unmarked, and surrounded by platoons of security guards-such is the opposition to any research that includes experiments with animals. And pharmaceutical companies that just forty years ago were perhaps the most visible symbol of our remarkable advance against disease have increasingly been seen as callous corporations propelled solely by avarice and greed. As Michael Specter sees it, this amounts to a war against progress. The issues may be complex but the choices are not: Are we going to continue to embrace new technologies, along with acknowledging their limitations and threats, or are we ready to slink back into an era of magical thinking? In Denialism, Specter makes an argument for a new Enlightenment, the revival of an approach to the physical world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of years: What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true. Now, at the time of mankind's greatest scientific advances-and our greatest need for them-that deal must be renewed.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths.</span></h3><p>Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.</p></div>


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<p class="description">In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life.Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence, and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war.</p>


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Book Three in the New York Times bestselling series.Nicholas Flamel's heart almost broke as he watched his beloved Paris crumble before him. The city was destroyed by Dee and Machiavelli, but Flamel played his own role in the destruction. Sophie and Josh Newman show every sign of being the twins of prophecy, and Flamel had to protect them and the pages from the Dark Elders.But Nicholas grows weaker with each passing day. Perenelle is still trapped in Alcatraz, and now that Scatty has gone missing, the group is without protection. Except for Clarent—the twin sword to Excalibur. But Clarent’s power is unthinkable, its evil making it nearly impossible to use without its darkness seeping into the soul of whoever wields it.If he hopes to defeat Dee, Nicholas must find an Elder who can teach Josh and Sophie the third elemental magic—Water Magic. The problem? The only one who can do that is Gilgamesh, and he is quite, quite insane.


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The fourth book in the New York Times bestselling series The Secrets of the Nicholas Flamel-The Necromancer San Francisco:After fleeing to Ojai, then Paris, and escaping to London, Josh and Sophie Newman are finally home. And after everything they've seen and learned in the past week, they're both more confused than ever about their future. Neither of them has mastered the magics they'll need to protect themselves from the Dark Elders, they've lost Scatty, and they're still being pursued by Dr. John Dee. Most disturbing of all, however, is that now they must ask themselves, can they trust Nicholas Flamel? Can they trust anyone? Alcatraz:Dr. Dee underestimated Perenelle Flamel's power. Alcatraz could not hold her, Nereus was no match for her, and she was able to align herself with the most unlikely of allies. But she wasn't the only one being held on the island. Behind the prison's bars and protective sigils were a menagerie of monsters-an army for Dee to use in the final battle. And now Machiavelli has come to Alcatraz to loose those monsters on San Francisco.Perenelle might be powerful, but each day she weakens, and even with Nicholas back at her side, a battle of this size could be too much for her. Nicholas and Perenelle must fight to protect the city, but the effort will probably kill them both. London:Having been unable to regain the two final pages of the Codex, Dee has failed his Elder and is now an outlaw-and the new prey of all the creatures formerly sent to hunt down Flamel.But Dee has a plan. With the Codex and the creatures on Alcatraz, he can control the world. All he needs is the help of the Archons. But for his plan to work, he must raise the Mother of the Gods from the dead. For that, he'll have to train a necromancer. And the twins of legend will make the perfect pupils. . . . The fourth book in the New York Times bestselling series The Secrets of the Nicholas Flamel—The Necromancer San Francisco:After fleeing to Ojai, then Paris, and escaping to London, Josh and Sophie Newman are finally home. And after everything they've seen and learned in the past week, they're both more confused than ever about their future. Neither of them has mastered the magics they'll need to protect themselves from the Dark Elders, they've lost Scatty, and they're still being pursued by Dr. John Dee. Most disturbing of all, however, is that now they must ask themselves, can they trust Nicholas Flamel? Can they trust anyone? Alcatraz:Dr. Dee underestimated Perenelle Flamel's power. Alcatraz could not hold her, Nereus was no match for her, and she was able to align herself with the most unlikely of allies. But she wasn't the only one being held on the island. Behind the prison's bars and protective sigils were a menagerie of monsters—an army for Dee to use in the final battle. And now Machiavelli has come to Alcatraz to loose those monsters on San Francisco.Perenelle might be powerful, but each day she weakens, and even with Nicholas back at her side, a battle of this size could be too much for her. Nicholas and Perenelle must fight to protect the city, but the effort will probably kill them both. London:Having been unable to regain the two final pages of the Codex, Dee has failed his Elder and is now an outlaw—and the new prey of all the creatures formerly sent to hunt down Flamel.But Dee has a plan. With the Codex and the creatures on Alcatraz, he can control the world. All he needs is the help of the Archons. But for his plan to work, he must raise the Mother of the Gods from the dead. For that, he'll have to train a necromancer. And the twins of legend will make the perfect pupils. . . .


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The New York Times bestseller now in paperback!In the second book in the New York Times bestselling series, Nicholas, Sophie, Josh, and Scatty emerge in Paris, the City of Light, home to Nicholas Flamel. Only this homecoming is anything but sweet. Niccolò Machiavelli, immortal author and celebrated art collector, lives in Paris and is working for Dr. John Dee. He’s in hot pursuit, and time is running out for Nicholas and Perenell. Josh and Sophie Newman are the world’s only hope. . . . If they don’t turn on each other first.★ “Readers will be swept up.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred“An exciting and impeccably thought-out fantasy, well-suited for those left in the lurch by Harry Potter’s recent exeunt.”—Booklist“Fans . . . will certainly find much to love, root for, and fear in this successful second installment.”—School Library Journal


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<p class="description">He holds the secret that can end the world.The truth: Nicholas Flamel was born in Paris on September 28, 1330. Nearly 700 years later, he is acknowledged as the greatest Alchemyst of his day. It is said that he discovered the secret of eternal life.The records show that he died in 1418.But his tomb is empty.The legend: Nicholas Flamel lives. But only because he has been making the elixir of life for centuries. The secret of eternal life is hidden within the book he protects—the Book of Abraham the Mage. It's the most powerful book that has ever existed. In the wrong hands, it will destroy the world. That's exactly what Dr. John Dee plans to do when he steals it. Humankind won't know what's happening until it's too late. And if the prophecy is right, Sophie and Josh Newman are the only ones with the power to save the world as we know it.Sometimes legends are true.And Sophie and Josh Newman are about to find themselves in the middle of the greatest legend of all time.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">This chronicle of the November 1958 sinking of the limestone carrier Carl D. Bradley in Lake Michigan is sure to appeal to the many fans of Junger’s The Perfect Storm (1997). Almost the entire crew of 35 died when the ship was literally torn in half during a fierce storm; the book recounts the incident and its tragic aftermath, including a dramatic search-and-rescue effort. It’s a poignant story, made even more poignant by the fact that most of the crew’s families lived in the same small town, Rogers City; this isn’t just a story about a tragedy on the water, but about an entire town coming to terms with the sudden loss of so many of its friends and family. Schumacher, the author of several nonfiction books including Mighty Fitz (2005), about the more famous sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, writes with a steady hand, never letting the drama or emotion of the moment overwhelm the storytelling. A solid and sometimes heartbreaking addition to the maritime-tragedy genre.</span></h3>

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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">An iconic figure in the world of comics, Will Eisner has stellar achievements worthy of the reverence shown by Schumacher (Wreck of the Carl D.). Fortified by intimate interviews, Schumacher's work shows an outsider during a Depression-era childhood, "an artistic dreamer and steely realist" determined to use his exceptional talent to forge a career. Eisner, his skills sharpened by an apprenticeship and a stint at Manhattan's noted Art Students League, created one of the first comics syndicates at a peak in the comics trend in the 1930s and '40s, recruiting such top names as Lou Fine, Bob Kane, and Jack Kirby. Despite wars, a congressional probe on the "immorality" of comics, and the cancer death of his daughter, Eisner produced remarkable work over eight decades: as a young artist, as the creator of a classic superhero, the Spirit, and as the father of the American graphic novel with his Contract with God trilogy. This exploration of Eisner, with photos and drawings, provides an absorbing glimpse of an American original who continually set the bar higher in his field. </span></h3>


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What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga pinpoints the change that made us thinking, sentient humans different from our predecessors. He explores what makes human brains special, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.


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<p class="description">"Michael Ruhlman has long enjoyed a love affair with cooking, food, and the work of the chef. His previous exploration of the restaurant kitchen and the men and women who call it home led Anthony Bourdain to call him "the greatest living writer on the subject of chefs - and on the business of preparing food." But even his broad experience couldn't have prepared him for the profound shift in American culture that has raised restaurant cooking to the level of performance art and the status of the chef to celebrity CEO." "Beginning at Per Se, one of the most recent, exclusive, and expensive of Manhattan's four-star restaurants, Ruhlman takes readers into some of America's most illustrious - and most frenetic - kitchens. Throughout his travels, he seeks out and explains new trends and phenomena, like Las Vegas's recent elevation to the country's food Gomorrah, and returns to previous haunts to see what's changed. A dispatch from a new world where chefs are stars and culinary school classes are burgeoning, The Reach of a Chef looks at the state of professional cooking in the post-Child, Food Network era via the heavy hitters in the industry such as Thomas Keller and Masa Takayama, Grant Achatz and Melissa Kelly, Emeril Lagasse and a new breed of cooking celebrity: girl next door Rachael Ray." "In the end, readers get an in-the-trenches look at professionals whose very life's work had once been to feed us in order to feed themselves - but is now increasingly a type of work that delivers them to corporate boardrooms and television studios."--BOOK JACKET.</p>


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<p class="description">Meet Cole: hapless space rogue, part-time smuggler, on a path to being full-time dead. His sidekick just stole his girlfriend. The galaxy's most hideous and feared bounty hunter wants to lay eggs in his brain. And the luxury space yacht Cole just hijacked turns out of be filled with interstellar do-gooders, one especially loathsome stowaway, and a cargo of freeze-dried orphans.Reluctantly compelled to deliver these defenseless, fluidless children to safety, Cole gathers a misfit crew for a desperate journey to the far reaches of the galaxy. Their destination: the mysterious world of Yrnameer, the very last of the your-name-heres—planets without corporate sponsors. But little does Cole know that this legendary utopia is home to a murderous band of outlaws bent on destroying the planet's tiny, peaceful community.Follow Cole's adventures through a delightfully absurd science-fiction universe, where the artificial intelligence is stupid, dust motes carry branding messages, and middle-management zombies have overrun a corporate training satellite. In the spirit of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, The Sheriff of Yrnameer is sci-fi comedy at its best—mordant, raucously funny, and a thrilling page-turner.</p>


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<p class="description">Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. Will it be fast food tonight, or something organic? Or perhaps something we grew ourselves? The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man discovered fire. But as Michael Pollan explains in this revolutionary book, how we answer it now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century may determine our survival as a species.</p>


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Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?


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<div><p>TWO MISSING GIRLS. TWO BRUTAL MURDERS. ALL CONNECTED TO ONE FARM HOUSE. WHO IS TO BLAME?<br></p><p>When pretty and popular teenagers Piper Hadley and Tash McBain disappear one Sunday morning, the investigation captivates a nation but the girls are never found.<br></p><p>Three years later, during the worst blizzard in a century, a husband and wife are brutally killed in the farmhouse where Tash McBain once lived. A suspect is in custody, a troubled young man who can hear voices and claims that he saw a girl that night being chased by a snowman.<br></p><p>Convinced that Piper or Tash might still be alive, clinical psychologist Joe O'Loughlin and ex-cop Vincent Ruiz, persuade the police to re-open the investigation. But they are racing against time to save the girls from someone with an evil, calculating and twisted mind.</p></div>


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<p class="description">What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food," the well-considered answers he provides to the questions posed in the bestselling "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused, complicated, and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists-all of whom have much to gain from our dietary confusion. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not "real." These "edible foodlike substances" are often packaged with labels bearing health claims that are typically false or misleading. Indeed, real food is fast disappearing from the marketplace, to be replaced by "nutrients," and plain old eating by an obsession with nutrition that is, paradoxically, ruining our health, not to mention our meals. Michael Pollan's sensible and decidedly counterintuitive advice is: "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food." Writing "In Defense of Food," and affirming the joy of eating, Pollan suggests that if we would pay more for better, well-grown food, but buy less of it, we'll benefit ourselves, our communities, and the environment at large. Taking a clear-eyed look at what science does and does not know about the links between diet and health, he proposes a new way to think about the question of what to eat that is informed by ecology and tradition rather than by the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrientapproach. "In Defense of Food" reminds us that, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, the solutions to the current omnivore's dilemma can be found all around us. In looking toward traditional diets the world over, as well as the foods our families-and regions-historically enjoyed, we can recover a more balanced, reasonable, and pleasurable approach to food. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we might start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives and enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy.</p>


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<p class="description">A pocket compendium of food wisdom-from the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food  Michael Pollan, our nation's most trusted resource for food-related issues, offers this indispensible guide for anyone concerned about health and food. Simple, sensible, and easy to use, Food Rules is a set of memorable rules for eating wisely, many drawn from a variety of ethnic or cultural traditions. Whether at the supermarket or an all-you-can-eat-buffet, this handy, pocket-size resource is the perfect guide for anyone who would like to become more mindful of the food we eat.</p>


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<div><p>In <em>Cooked</em>, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world, standing squarely between nature and culture. Both realms are transformed by cooking, and so, in the process, is the cook.<br></p><p>Each section of <em>Cooked </em>tracks Pollan’s effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse–trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius “fermentos” (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, the soil, farmers, our history and culture, and, of course, the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Cooking, above all, connects us.<br></p><p>The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, <em>Cooked</em> argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.</p></div>


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Michael Pollan's unmatched ability to draw lines of connection between our everyday experiences— whether eating, gardening, or building—and the natural world has been the basis for the popular success of his many works of nonfiction, including the genre-defining bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. With this updated edition of his earlier book A Place of My Own, readers can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan's realization of a room of his own—a small, wooden hut, his “shelter for daydreams”—built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">In this stimulating and authoritative overview, Michael Pearson reverses the traditional angle of maritime history and looks from the sea to its shores - its impact on the land through trade, naval power, travel and scientific exploration. This vast ocean, both connecting and separating nations, has shaped many countries' cultures and ideologies through the movement of goods, people, ideas and religions across the sea.</span></h3><p><em>The Indian Ocean</em> moves from a discussion of physical elements, its shape, winds, currents and boundaries, to a history from pre-Islamic times to the modern period of European dominance. Going far beyond pure maritime history, this compelling survey is an invaluable addition to political, cultural and economic world history.</p></div>


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<p>From prize-winning journalist to talk show king on a show voted one of the top 10 British TV programs of all time, Michael Parkinson's starry career spans over four decades. Now an international celebrity himself, the man from a humble but colorful Yorkshire mining family who can tease out the secrets of even the most reticent star guest, at last reveals his own story, with the easy manner and insight that has kept his audiences fascinated. His distinguished career has involved working on highly acclaimed current affairs and film shows. His wide interests and expertise include jazz, film, soccer, and cricket. Witty, humorous, and blessed with exceptional intellectual clarity, Michael Parkinson's memoir is a joy to read.</p>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">In this anemic medical thriller from bestseller Palmer (_The Second Opinion_), former trauma surgeon Dr. Nick Garrity, who suffers from PTSD as the result of a suicide attack on his field hospital in Afghanistan, is now in charge of the Helping Hands RV, a mobile clinic that plies the streets of Baltimore offering medical aid to the homeless. Meanwhile, a high-priced hit man starts to commit a series of murders, his first victim being Belle Coates, a nurse in Charlotte, N.C. When Belle's sister, Jillian, who lives in Virginia, searches for her sister's killer, she finds a connection to Nick. Several missing homeless men lead everyone to a massive plot involving high-level politicians and a secret CIA program. The action is all fairly predictable, the characters off-the-shelf, and the writing, if not exactly purple, at least mauve: A guttural, primal scream exploded from Nick's throat as he crouched by the body.</span></h3>


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<p>“Michael Palin is not just one of Britain’s foremost comedy character actors, he also talks a lot. Yap, yap, yap he goes, all day long and through the night . . . then, some nights, when everyone else has gone to bed, he goes home and writes up a diary.” —John Cleese </p><p>“For Palin it has been one hell of a ride, but he seems to have maintained equilibrium all along the way. . . . In sum, it’s tempting to call him a Renaissance Man. But that, as any Pythonite would be quick to tell you, would be silly.” —Jonathan Yardley, <em>The Washington Post Book World</em></p><p>Michael Palin has kept a diary since he was newly married in the late 1960s, when he was beginning to make a name for himself as a TV scriptwriter, and Monty Python was just around the corner. </p><p>This volume of his diaries reveals how Python emerged and triumphed, how he, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, the two Terrys—Jones and Gilliam—and Eric Idle came together and changed the face of British comedy. But this is but only part of Palin’s story. Here too is his growing family, his home in a north London Victorian terrace, his solo effort as an actor_,_ and his writing endeavours (often in partnership with Terry Jones) that produce <em>Ripping Yarns</em> and even a pantomime. </p><p>Meanwhile, Monty Python refuses to go away: his account of the making of both <em>The Holy Grail</em> and the <em>Life of Brian</em> movies are page-turners, and the sometimes extraordinary goings-on of the many powerful personalities who coalesced to form the Python team makes for funny and riveting reading. </p><p>A perceptive and witty chronicle, the diaries are a rich portrait of a fascinating period.</p><p>“[C]harming and at times revelatory . . . A voice of (relative sanity) in the eye of a comedic storm, Palin paints so vivid a picture that the reader becomes a Python by proxy.” —_The New York Times Book Review_</p><p>“It is terrifically good: funny, astute, and wonderfully written. . . . ”—_The Boston Globe_</p><p>“This combination of niceness, with his natural volubility, creates Palin’s expansiveness.” -David Baddiel, <em>The Times</em></p><p>“A real delight to read.” -_Saga _Magazine (UK)</p><p>“His showbiz observations are so absorbing. . . . Palin is an elegant and engaging writer.” -William Cook, <em>The Guardian</em> (UK)</p><p>“A wealth of fascinating stuff about Monty Python.” -_The Independent_ (UK)</p><p>“Our favourite TV explorer shows us the workings of an unstoppable machine.” -_Daily Express_ (UK)</p><p>“A riveting commentary to a remarkably creative decade.” -_Academy_ (UK) </p>


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<div><p>On the night of the State of the Union address, President James Allaire expects to give the speech of his career. But no one anticipates the terrifying turn of events that forces him to quarantine everyone in the Capitol building. A terrorist group calling itself “Genesis” has unleashed WRX3883, a deadly, highly contagious virus, into the building. No one fully knows the deadly effect of the germ except for the team responsible for its development—a team headed by Allaire, himself. The only one who might be able to help is virologist Griffin Rhodes, currently in solitary confinement in a maximum security federal prison for alleged terrorist acts, including the attempted theft of WRX3883 from the lab where he worked. Rhodes has no idea why he has been arrested, but when Allaire offers to free him in exchange for his help combating the virus, he reluctantly agrees to do what he can to support the government that has imprisoned him without apparent cause.</p><p>Meanwhile, every single person in line for presidential succession is trapped inside the Capitol—every person except one: the Director of Homeland Security, who is safely at home in Minnesota, having been selected as the “Designated Survivor” for this event. With enemies both named and unnamed closing in, and the security of the nation at stake, Griff must unravel the mysteries of WRX3883 without violating his pledge as a scientist to use no animal testing in his experiments…and time is running out. </p><p>Tense, thrilling, and entirely plausible, <em>A Heartbeat Away </em>will make you reflect, wonder, and be truly afraid.</p></div>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">Michael Oher is the young man at the center of the true story depicted in <em>The Blind Side</em> movie (and book) that swept up awards and accolades. Though the odds were heavily stacked against him, Michael had a burning desire deep within his soul to break out of the Memphis inner-city ghetto and into a world of opportunity. While many people are now familiar with Oher's amazing journey, this is the first time he shares his account of his story in his own words, revealing his thoughts and feelings with details that only he knows, and offering his point of view on how anyone can achieve a better life.</span></h3><p>Looking back on how he went from being a homeless child in Memphis to playing in the NFL, Michael talks about the goals he had for himself in order to break out of the cycle of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness that trapped his family for so long. He recounts poignant stories growing up in the projects and running from child services and foster care over and over again in search of some familiarity. Eventually he grasped onto football as his ticket out of the madness and worked hard to make his dream into a reality. But Oher also knew he would not be successful alone. With his adoptive family, the Touhys, and other influential people in mind, he describes the absolute necessity of seeking out positive role models and good friends who share the same values to achieve one's dreams.   </p><p>Sharing untold stories of heartache, determination, courage, and love, <em>I Beat the Odds</em> is an incredibly rousing tale of one young man's quest to achieve the American dream. </p></div>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">According to this congenial biography by film journalist Munn, movie legend Wayne (1907–1979) was a hard worker who held tight to his beliefs and what he thought he should show on screen. Wayne's career did have its share of controversy (although he starred in cutthroat war films, Wayne didn't sign up for military service in WWII; he rejected communism, which made him the object of Stalinist threats; and the actor's given name is still debated), and Munn deftly addresses those hullabaloos while providing an overview of the actor's accomplishments. After playing football at USC, Wayne worked as a studio prop man, coming into early contact with director John Ford, who would direct Wayne in some of his most memorable performances, including 1952's The Quiet Man. Throughout their association, Ford treated Wayne erratically, disparaging his talents and lashing out at him for accepting a lead role from rival director Raoul Walsh (The Big Trail, 1930). Yet Ford and Wayne collaborated on 1939's Stagecoach, which gave birth to the serious western and the Ford-Wayne movie subgenre. Other highlights include Wayne's emergence as a heavy in 1948's Red River and his ferocious performance in 1956's The Searchers. Munn portrays the actor in his personal life as a man's man, who sustained friendships with tough cohorts like stuntman Yakima Canutt but failed in romance. Although the book takes an odd turn toward the end, when Munn links Wayne's patriotism and heroic persona to the heroic actions after September 11, overall, it's a fine tribute. </span></h3>


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With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past–a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder–Michael Ondaatje’s most powerful novel yet.


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">"I had an unusually large-sized head, though this was not uncommon for a baby in the Midwest. The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow in case one day we found ourselves exposed to something we didn't understand, like a foreign language, or a salad."</span></h3><p>Michael Moore-Oscar-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, the nation's unofficial provocateur laureate-is back, this time taking on an entirely new role, that of his own meta-<em>Forrest Gump</em>.</p><p>Breaking the autobiographical mode, he presents twenty-four far-ranging, irreverent, and stranger-than-fiction vignettes from his own early life. One moment he's an eleven-year-old boy lost in the Senate and found by Bobby Kennedy; and in the next, he's inside the Bitburg cemetery with a dazed and confused Ronald Reagan. Fast-forwarding to 2003, he stuns the world by uttering the words "We live in fictitious times... with a fictitious president" in place of the expected "I'd like to thank the Academy."</p><p>And none of that even comes close to the night the friendly priest at the seminary decides to show him how to perform his own exorcism.</p><p>Capturing the zeitgeist of the past fifty years, yet deeply personal and unflinchingly honest, HERE COMES TROUBLE takes readers on an unforgettable, take-no-prisoners ride through the life and times of Michael Moore. No one will come away from this book without a sense of surprise about the Michael Moore most of us didn't know. Alternately funny, eye-opening, and moving, it's a book he has been writing-and living-his entire life.</p></div>


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<p class="description">In 1914, Joey, a beautiful bay-red foal with a distinctive cross on his nose, is sold to the army and thrust into the midst of the war on the Western Front. With his officer, he charges toward the enemy, witnessing the horror of the battles in France. But even in the desolation of the trenches, Joey's courage touches the soldiers around him and he is able to find warmth and hope. But his heart aches for Albert, the farmer's son he left behind. Will he ever see his true master again?</p>


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<p class="description">Now sword and man are one, and Elric and his blade Stormbringer must go forth through havoc and horror to carve out their destiny.</p>


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<p class="description">Lord Elric wields his mighty sword, Stormbringer, in the desperate battle to overcome the evil power of the sorcerer, Theleb K'aarna</p>


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<p class="description">After much wandering and seeking Elric finally discovers the location of the sorcerer who had earlier inconvenienced him. A meeting of old friends and scattered brothers evolves into a union of vengeance. A demon sent hoping to devour an albino is thwarted, but it's master's aim's are met with Elric's capture. A bargain made with a well intentioned merchant wins Elric his freedom, but only half of him is allowed to escape. Elric restored with his symbiotic blade calls upon unholy aide to finally vanquish his meddlesome sorceress enemy. The final assault brings a grievous death as the dragon caves will no longer have a master. A promise broken and an unwanted soul taken by Elric's hungry companion. Another hollow victory causes Elric much discomfort.</p>


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<p class="description">Forced to flee his city of Melnibone, Elric and his sorcerous blade Stormbringer journey through barren hills to the edge of a black sea. Elric finds a dark ship and begins a voyage that will bring him face-to-face with all the champions Time can summon--and more. </p>


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<p class="description">Moorcock is off at full throttle. Every scene has ironic meaning. A couple of minor stories, and we're into the lush, manic rush to Armageddon that is STORMBRINGER! Still the greatest plot on the planet, build and build until the final, cataclysmic - and said to be the best in all fantasy fiction - ending, which is completely stunning. Long before Pullman won the Whitbread Moorcock was offering this mad, bad and thoroughly humane fantasy to the world. He remains a giant.</p>


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<p class="description">Elric of Melniboné is a requisite title in the hard fantasy canon, a book no fantasy fan should leave unread. Author Michael Moorcock, already a major player in science fiction, cemented his position in the fantasy pantheon with the five-book Elric saga, of which Elric of Melniboné is the first installment. The book's namesake, the brooding albino emperor of the dying nation of Melniboné, is a sort of Superman for Goths, truly an archetype of the genre. The youthful Elric is a cynical and melancholy king, heir to a nation whose 100,000-year rule of the world ended less than 500 years hence. More interested in brooding contemplation than holding the throne, Elric is a reluctant ruler, but he also realizes that no other worthy successor exists and the survival of his once-powerful, decadent nation depends on him alone. Elric's nefarious, brutish cousin Yrkoon has no patience for his physically weak kinsman, and he plots constantly to seize Elric's throne, usually over his dead body. Elric of Melniboné follows Yrkoon's scheming, reaching its climax in a battle between Elric and Yrkoon with the demonic runeblades Stormbringer and Mournblade. In this battle, Elric gains control of the soul-stealing Stormbringer, an event that proves pivotal to the Elric saga.</p>


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Michael McIntyre is Britain's biggest comedy star. He has released two record-breaking DVDs, Live and Laughing and Hello Wembley; hosts his own BAFTA-nominated BBC1 series, Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow; and has picked up British Comedy Awards for Best Live Stand-Up and Best Male TV Comic. Last year he became the youngest ever host of the Royal Variety Performance, and now in 2011 he takes the hot seat as a judge in the hit ITV show Britain's Got Talent. How did he get there? Michael reveals all in his remarkably honest and hilarious autobiography, Life & Laughing. His showbiz roots, his appalling attempts to attract the opposite sex, his fish-out-of-water move from public to state school and his astonishing journey from selling just one ticket at the Edinburgh Festival to selling half a million tickets on his last tour. Michael's story is riveting, poignant, romantic and above all very, very funny.


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In this novel, Greek tragedy meets a dysfunctional family from Maryland, revealing how time and place matter little when it comes to the implacable logic of the darkest human emotions. The family matriarch–half Medea, half Clytemnestra–calls home her three children, who take turns narrating this story, for a final, bedside reunion. There’s the firstborn, Maury, who has Asperger’s, and whose poetic and offbeat reasoning is both endearing and heartbreaking; Candy, his sister, who takes care of their mother, having renounced marrying the man she loves; and Quinn, the wonder boy who left his white trash background to become a successful actor in London. Mother still lives in the house where she made their lives miserable as children and where their father was murdered–a crime for which Maury went to jail as a teenager. Once the family is reassembled in the childhood home, the pieces of a somber puzzle come together over brilliant and witty exchanges showing Irish humor at its best. Mewshaw invites us into the heart of a family dynamic, at times almost too close for comfort, exploding prejudices about murder and family love.


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<p>When a fire in an abandoned fruit stand in rural Lincoln County reveals the murdered body of a woman gone missing from Sante Fe years ago, Police Chief Kevin Kerney finds himself cooperating with his estranged son, a man he hardly knows, Deputy Sheriff Clayton Istee. While Kerney digs into the woman's past, hoping to find clues that will lead to a credible suspect, Clayton must unravel two more homicides that seem on the surface totally unrelated. As Kerney chases down clues that raise questions about the legitimacy of a highly regarded modeling and talent agency, Clayton works to discover the identity of a murder suspect alleged to have ties to prostitution and illegal gambling. Set against the backdrop of the high mountains of southern New Mexico, where gambling is big business and private sexual encounters for VIPs can be discreetly arranged, Kerney and Clayton must go up against the rich and politically powerful opponents who are willing to protect their reputations at all costs.</p>


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An electrifying thriller from the author of the international bestseller THE STRAW MEN. A guilty man walks alone into the cold mountain forests of Washington State, aiming never to return. What he finds there starts a chain of events that will quickly spiral out of control.  Meanwhile in Los Angeles a woman's body is discovered, sitting bolt upright in a motel bedroom. She is dead, and her killer has left his mark. It soon becomes clear he has something to say, and a lot more work to do. And Ward Hopkins, an ex-CIA agent recovering from the recent shocking death of his parents, is on the trail of his past, tracking down the men who destroyed everything he once held dear, and the murderer whose face he sees every time he looks in the mirror. These three are ominous strands in a web of deadly secrets, roads to a dark history that should never have been told. There are people who will do anything to protect it. Anything at all. It's not a matter of who dies. We're all going to die. What matters is who dies last. Michael Marshall's unique voice adds a chilling intensity to the serial-killer plot, combining dazzling narrative, a white-hot pace and a deeply disturbing backdrop of conspiracy.


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Michael Marshall's unique voice adds a chilling intensity to the serial-killer plot, combining dazzling narrative, a white-hot pace and a deeply disturbing backdrop of conspiracy.  Sarah tries to struggle, but the man holds her. The scream never makes it out of her throat. 'Nobody watching,' the man says with hateful calm. 'I made it this way. I can walk where nobody sees.'  The Straw Men. They kill people. Any people. And soon they'll get around to you.  Sarah Becker is the fifth girl to be abducted by this maniac. Judging from the state of the bodies that have been found, her long hair will be hacked off and she will be tortured. She has about a week to live. Former LA homicide detective John Zandt has an inside track on the perpetrator -- his own daughter was one of his victims two years ago. But the key to Sarah's whereabouts lies with Ward Hopkins, a man with a past so secret not even he knows about it. His parents have just died in a car accident, but they leave Ward a very strange message that leads him to question everything he once believed to be true.  As he begins to investigate his own past Ward finds himself drawn into the shadowy, sinister world of the Straw Men -- and into the desperate race to find Sarah, before her time runs out.


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"Since aiding in the capture of his brother, the serial killer known as the Upright Man, Ward Hopkins, has been avoiding his demons holed up in a log cabin with his girlfriend, FBI agent Nina Baynam. But when Nina's boss turns up with an intriguing new serial-killer case for her, the couple realize they can't hide forever. Especially when they learn that the Upright Man has escaped from custody." "Ward's brother must have had help. The most likely candidates are the Straw Men, the shadowy organization founded on murder as a way of life that killed Ward's parents. Former homicide cop John Zandt is obsessed with tracking them down following their murder of his daughter, and as he digs deeper he discovers extraordinary secrets about American history and society." "The shadows are gathering, and across America sinister forces are stirring. Only Ward, Nina and John stand against the Upright Man and his terrifying allies. It's just a question of when the next killings will start...and whether they will ever stop."--BOOK JACKET.


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<div><p>The humor and insights in the 2nd Edition of <em>Managing Humans</em> are drawn from <strong>Michael Lopp's</strong> management experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland, among others. This book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other and occasionally throw chairs. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who, through a mystical organizational ritual, have been given power over the future and bank accounts of many others. Whether you're an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you—and help you survive and prosper amongst the general craziness.<br></p><p>Lopp's straight-from-the-hip style is unlike any other writer on management. He pulls no punches and tells stories he probably shouldn't. But they are massively instructive and cut to the heart of the matter whether it's dealing with your boss, handling a slacker, hiring top guns, or seeing a knotty project through to completion.<br></p><p>This second editions expands on the management essentials. It will explain why we hate meetings, but must have them, it carefully documents the right way to have a 1-on-1, and it documents the perils of not listening to your team.<br></p><p>Writing code is easy. Managing humans is not. You need a book to help you do it, and this is it. </p><h3>What you’ll learn</h3><ul><li>How to lead geeks </li><li>How to handle conflict </li><li>How to hire well </li><li>How to motivate employees </li><li>How to manage your boss  </li><li>How to say no </li><li>How to handle stressed people freaking out </li><li>How to improve your social IQ </li><li>How to run a meeting well </li><li>And much more </li></ul><h3>Who this book is for</h3><p>This book is designed for managers and would-be managers staring at the role of a manager wondering why they would ever leave the safe world of bits and bytes for the messy world of managing humans. The book covers handling conflict, managing wildly differing personality types, infusing innovation into insane product schedules, and figuring out how to build a lasting and useful engineering culture.</p></div>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; ">Florida may no longer be the crime-fiction hot spot it was in the wake of Miami Vice (and the cocaine cowboys of South Beach), but perhaps the union’s most distinctive, diverse, and perverse state still boasts an impressive list of crime writers. This anthology brings together many of those writers to celebrate not only the state’s richness as a setting but also the special power of the short story. Included are James W. Hall, Tom Corcoran, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, James. O. Born, John Dufresne, and Jonathan King—names just about every fan will recognize and writers whose use of the Florida landscape is at the heart of their work. Also included are well-known writers, such as John Lutz, whose work is set in a variety of locations not limited to Florida. The quality of the stories is high across the board, making this collection of definite interest both to followers of Florida crime fiction specifically and to anyone who enjoys the hard-boiled and noir styles. </span></h3></div>


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<p class="description">In theaters in time for Thanksgiving, The Blind Side is a feature movie based on Michael's Lewis's New York Times bestseller, produced by Alcon Entertainment and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. The Blind Side tells the inspirational story of Michael Oher, a homeless black teen taken under the wing of the Touhys, a wealthy white Memphis family. Oher's size and speed on the football field bring him accolades. But learning the game's strategy and making it as a student take the help of his new family, coaches, and tutor.Sandra Bullock stars as Leigh Anne Touhy, the sharp-witted and compassionate matriarch. Tim McGraw stars as her sports-enthusiast husband. Oscar winner Kathy Bates plays Miss Sue, Oher's indefatigable tutor. Quinton Aaron has his first major role as Oher. John Lee Hancock, who directed The Rookie and The Alamo, writes and directs the film.Michael Oher was just drafted in the first round of the NFL Draft by the Baltimore Ravens. This edition includes a new afterword bringing Oher's life up to date through college and the NFL.</p>


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<p class="description"> The #1 New York Times bestseller: a brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. When the crash of the U. S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine, and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking. The crucial question is this: Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 best-selling Liar’s Poker. Who got it right? he asks. Who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? And what qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? Out of this handful of unlikely—really unlikely—heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.</p>


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<p>Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, is leading a revolution. Reinventing his team on a budget, he needs to outsmart the richer teams. He signs undervalued players whom the scouts consider flawed but who have a knack for getting on base, scoring runs, and winning games. <em>Moneyball</em> is a quest for the secret of success in baseball and a tale of the search for new baseball knowledge—insights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.</p>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">Late in august 410, a large troop of soldiers bore down on the city of Rome. At their head rode the general Alaric, in the full insignia of a magister militum. It was the highest command in the Roman army, won after years of politicking and military success. But Alaric was more than a Roman general. He was also a Gothic chieftain, some might have said a king. As far as contemporaries were concerned, the soldiers who followed him were Goths. Sometimes, to be sure, Alaric had put his followers at the service of the Roman emperor. When he did so, they became a unit in the Roman army. But their loyalty was to Alaric, not to the emperor or the empire, and everyone knew it. Alaric might be a Roman general, but no one ever mistook his followers for Roman soldiers. They were the Goths, and Alaric had led them against regular imperial armies more than once. In the early fifth century, the line between Roman regiment and barbarian horde was a fine one, and Alaric straddled it as best he could. But no one was quite taken in by appearances, and Alaric never succeeded in turning himself into the legitimate Roman commander he so desperately wanted to be.</span></h3>


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<p>The story of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair begins with Michael Lang, a kid out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who liked to smoke a joint and listen to jazz. He would find his way to Florida, open a head shop, and produce his first festival—Miami Pop, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and others—then travel to Woodstock, where, after meeting Artie Kornfeld, his vision for a festival where folks could come and stay for a few days amid the rural beauty of upstate New York would become a reality. With Artie, new partners John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, and his handpicked crew, Lang booked talent, from Janis Joplin and the Who to the virtually unknown Santana and Crosby, Stills and Nash; won over agents, promoters, and townspeople; took on fleets of volunteers; built a festival site from the ground up; and, in the end, created the landmark cultural event that defined a generation.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">The smell of sweet cinnamon on your morning oatmeal, the gentle heat of gingerbread, the sharp piquant bite from your everyday peppermill. The tales these spices could tell: of lavish Renaissance banquets perfumed with cloves, and flimsy sailing ships sent around the world to secure a scented prize; of cinnamon-dusted custard tarts and nutmeg-induced genocide; of pungent elixirs and the quest for the pepper groves of paradise.</span></h3><p>The Taste of Conquest offers up a riveting, globe-trotting tale of unquenchable desire, fanatical religion, raw greed, fickle fashion, and mouthwatering cuisine–in short, the very stuff of which our world is made. In this engaging, enlightening, and anecdote-filled history, Michael Krondl, a noted chef turned writer and food historian, tells the story of three legendary cities–Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam–and how their single-minded pursuit of spice helped to make (and remake) the Western diet and set in motion the first great wave of globalization.  </p><p>In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world’s peoples were irrevocably brought together as a result of the spice trade. Before the great voyages of discovery, Venice controlled the business in Eastern seasonings and thereby became medieval Europe’s most cosmopolitan urban center. Driven to dominate this trade, Portugal’s mariners pioneered sea routes to the New World and around the Cape of Good Hope to India to unseat Venice as Europe’s chief pepper dealer. Then, in the 1600s, the savvy businessmen of Amsterdam “invented” the modern corporation–the Dutch East India Company–and took over as spice merchants to the world.  </p><p>Sharing meals and stories with Indian pepper planters, Portuguese sailors, and Venetian foodies, Krondl takes every opportunity to explore the world of long ago and sample its many flavors. The spice trade and its cultural exchanges didn’t merely lend kick to the traditional Venetian cookies called peverini, or add flavor to Portuguese sausages of every description, or even make the Indonesian rice table more popular than Chinese takeout in trendy Amsterdam. No, the taste for spice of a few wealthy Europeans led to great crusades, astonishing feats of bravery, and even wholesale slaughter.  </p><p>As stimulating as it is pleasurable, and filled with surprising insights, The Taste of Conquest offers a fascinating perspective on how, in search of a tastier dish, the world has been transformed.</p></div>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">This little book will inevitably be compared with Josiah Bunting's similarly short biography of one of the world's greatest military figures. The marriage of author and subject works well, although Korda (_Horse People: Scenes from the Riding Life_, etc.) doesn't have much new to say about Lincoln's favorite general. That's not surprising, since everyone now writes about Grant in the shadow of Edmund Wilson, who gave new fame to Grant's memoirs, and William McFeely, who has written the best full biography to date. Even so, Korda freshly characterizes his man without psychologizing an unpromising subject. Grant was, after all, unyieldingly stolid and tight-lipped. While his qualities of directness and taciturnity made him a great general, they didn't yield up a fascinating man or a great president. Korda does about as good a job of bringing Grant to life as possible and handles all the essential set pieces—Grant as Mexican War officer, Civil War general, president and author of masterful memoirs on the eve of his death—with much skill. He's less perceptive than Bunting about Grant's presidency and occasionally puts unnecessary erudition on display, but on the whole this is a highly readable, accurate study of the man. </span></h3>


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<div><p>In an isolated stretch of eastern Kentucky, on a hilltop known as Blade Ridge, stands a lighthouse that illuminates nothing but the surrounding woods. For years the lighthouse has been considered no more than an eccentric local landmark-until its builder is found dead at the top of the light, and his belongings reveal a troubling local history.<br></p><p>For deputy sheriff Kevin Kimble, the lighthouse-keeper's death is disturbing and personal. Years ago, Kimble was shot while on duty. Somehow the death suggests a connection between the lighthouse and the most terrifying moment of his life. <br></p><p>Audrey Clark is in the midst of moving her large-cat sanctuary onto land adjacent to the lighthouse. Sixty-seven tigers, lions, leopards, and one legendary black panther are about to have a new home there. Her husband, the sanctuary's founder, died scouting the new property, and Audrey is determined to see his vision through. <br></p><p>As strange occurrences multiply at the Ridge, the animals grow ever more restless, and Kimble and Audrey try to understand what evil forces are moving through this ancient landscape, just past the divide between dark and light. </p></div>


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Michael Korda's Hero is the story of an epic life on a grand scale, a revealing, in-depth, and gripping biography of the extraordinary, mysterious, and dynamic Englishman whose daring exploits and romantic profile - including his sun-burnished blonde looks and flowing white robes - made him an object of intense fascination, known the world over as "Lawrence of Arabia". However, unlike other biographers, Korda does not seek to burnish or destroy the legend; rather he aims to demystify and reveal the real man - T.E. Lawrence - as he truly was.An Oxford Scholar and archaeologist, one of the five illegitimate sons of a British aristocrat who ran away with his daughters' governess, Lawrence was sent to Cairo as an intelligence officer in 1916, vanished into the desert in 1917, and re-emerged as the greatest and most colourful figure of WW1. A foreigner, he united and led the Arab tribes to defeat the Turks and eventually capture Damascus. Yet as he illuminates Lawrence's achievements, Korda digs further to expose the flesh-and-blood man and his contradictory nature: a born leader utterly fearless and seemingly impervious to pain, thirst, fatigue and danger who remained shy, modest, and retiring; a scholar and an aesthete who was also a bold and cold-blooded warrior. As Korda shows, Lawrence was not only a man of his times, but a visionary whose achievements - as a farsighted diplomat, brilliant military strategist, the first media celebrity, and acclaimed writer - transcended them.Korda analyses Lawrence's vision for the modern Middle East, plans that, if they had been carried through, might have prevented the hatred and bloodshed that have become ubiquitous in the region. Ultimately, as this magisterial work demonstrates, Lawrence remains the paradigm of the hero in modern times, the arch-heroic type whose life was at once a triumph and a sacrifice, and whose capacity to astonish remains undimmed.


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<p>“I’ve always wanted to be able to tell stories, you know, stories that came from my soul. I’d like to sit by a fire and tell people stories – make them see pictures, make them cry and laugh, take them anywhere emotionally with something as deceptively simple as words. I’d like to tell tales to move their souls and transform them. I’ve always wanted to be able to do that. Imagine how the great writers must feel, knowing they have that power. I sometimes feel I could do it. It’s something I’d like to develop. In a way, songwriting uses the same skills, creates the emotional highs and lows, but the story is a sketch. It’s quicksilver. There are very few books written on the art of storytelling, how to grip listeners, how to get a group of people together and amuse them. No costumes, no makeup, no nothing, just you and your voice, and your powerful ability to take them anywhere, to transform their lives, if only for minutes.” –Michael Jackson, in Moonwalk</p>


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In the tradition of TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE and THE LAST LECTURE comes an inspiring book of life lessons from Michael J Fox. Michael J Fox didn t finish high school, but he has gone on to receive honorary degrees from several universities and has achieved the highest accolades for his acting, as well as his writing. In his new book, he inspires and motivates his readers to work hard, achieve the most they can and maximise their abilities - all with his trademark optimism, warmth and humour. From moving to Los Angeles fresh from Canada, without a high school degree and learning to live on a wage; to taking on roles in Family Ties and the Back to the Future movies and nearly crashing and burning; and then learning to cope first with the death of his father and then with his own diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, MJF shares what he's learned about life, work, love, family and happiness and everything else along the way.


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<p>"The sequence of civil wars that ripped England apart in the seventeenth century was the single most traumatic event in this country between the medieval Black Death and the two world wars. Indeed, it is likely that a greater percentage of the population was killed in the civil wars than in First World War." "This sense of overwhelming trauma gives this major new history its title: God's Fury, England's Fire. The name of a pamphlet written after the king's surrender, it sums up the widespread feeling within England that the seemingly endless nightmare that had destroyed families, towns and livelihoods was ordained by a vengeful God - that the people of England had sinned and were now being punished. As with all civil wars, however, 'God's fury' could support or destroy either side in the conflict. Was God angry at Charles I for failing to support the true, Protestant religion and refusing to work with Parliament? Or was God angry with those who had dared challenge His anointed Sovereign?" "Michael Braddock's remarkable book gives the reader a vivid and enduring sense of both what it was like to live through events of uncontrollable violence and what really animated the different sides. The killing of Charles I and the declaration of a republic - events which even now seem in an English context utterly astounding - were by no means the only possible outcomes, and Braddock brilliantly describes the twists and turns that led to the most radical solutions of all to the country's political implosion. He also describes very effectively the influence of events in Scotland, Ireland, and the European mainland on the conflict in England." God's Fury, England's Fire allows readers tounderstand once more the events that have so fundamentally marked this country and which still resonate centuries after their bloody ending.</p>


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<p class="description">Modern Rome is a city rife with contradictions. Once the seat of ancient glory, it is now often the object of national contempt. It plays a significant part on the world stage, but the concerns of its residents are often deeply parochial. And while they live in the seat of a world religion, Romans can be vehemently anticlerical. These tensions between the past and the present, the global and the local, make Rome fertile ground to study urban social life, the construction of the past, the role of religion in daily life, and how a capital city relates to the rest of the nation.Michael Herzfeld focuses on Rome’s historic Monti district and the wrenching dislocation caused by rapid economical, political, and social change. Evicted from Eternity tells the story of the gentrification of Monti—once the architecturally stunning home of a community of artisans and shopkeepers now displaced by an invasion of rapacious real estate speculators, corrupt officials, dithering politicians, deceptive clerics, and shady thugs. As Herzfeld picks apart the messy story of Monti’s transformation, he ranges widely over many aspects of life there and in the rest of the city, richly depicting the uniquely local landscape of globalization in Rome.</p>


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An order of warrior monks founded to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem, the Templars were among the wealthiest and most powerful bodies in the medieval world. Yet two centuries later, they were arrested, accused of blasphemy, heresy and orgies, and their leaders were burnt at the stake.Part guide, part history, this book investigates the Templar legends and legacy from the mysteries of Solomons Temple in Jerusalem, via nineteenth century development of the Freemasons, through to Templar appearances in Dan Brown and Indiana Jones.This book explains the whole context of Templar history, including the recent evidence discovered by the Vatican that the Templars were not guilty of heresy. It also features a guide to Templar castles and sites.


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New York Times bestselling author Michael Gruber, a member of "the elite ranks of those who can both chill the blood and challenge the mind" (The Denver Post), delivers a taut, multilayered, riveting novel of suspenseSomewhere in Pakistan, Sonia Laghari and eight fellow members of a symposium on peace are being held captive by armed terrorists. Sonia, a deeply religious woman as well as a Jungian psychologist, has become the de facto leader of the kidnapped group. While her son Theo, an ex-Delta soldier, uses his military connections to find and free the victims, Sonia tries to keep them all alive by working her way into the kidnappers' psyches and interpreting their dreams. With her knowledge of their language, her familiarity with their religion, and her Jungian training, Sonia confounds her captors with her insights and beliefs. Meanwhile, when the kidnappers decide to kill their captives, one by one, in retaliation for perceived crimes against their country, Theo races against the clock to try and save their lives.


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<div><p><strong>In a wry take on how contemporary culture is antithetical to happiness, Michael Foley paints a philosophical but hugely entertaining portrait of the cultural landscapeand comes up smiling</strong></p><p>The good news is that the great thinkers from history have proposed the same strategies for happiness and fulfillmentthe bad news is that these turn out to be the very things most discouraged by contemporary culture. This knotty dilemma is the subject of Michael Foley's wry and accessible investigation into how the desirable states of well-being and satisfaction are constantly undermined by modern life. He examines the elusive condition of happiness common to philosophy, spiritual teachings, and contemporary psychology, then shows how these are becoming increasingly difficult to apply in a world of high expectations. The common challenges of earning a living, maintaining a relationship, and aging are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst and self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane partnerships, and perpetual youth. Ultimately, rather than denouncing and rejecting the age, Foley presents an entertaining strategy of not just accepting but embracing today's worldfinding happiness in its absurdity. </p></div>


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THE ASCENSION BEGINS. A Catholic bishop. A Quaker prayer leader. A Methodist minister. A Mormon ward leader. An entire congregation of Seventh Day Adventists. What do they have in common? They all minister to people's spiritual needs. And someone-or something-is ripping them to shreds for it. A BLOODY WARNING. Police detective Caldwell "Cal" Evans, still three weeks shy of completing rehab, is called in on the case. His only clue is a chilling message written in blood at the first murder scene: "Leave the Christ alone. He does not belong to you." THE SERPENT SHALL REIGN. With bodies piling up, Cal and his partner, Velvet Rabinowitz, chase leads involving snake-handling cults, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and an ancient ceremony left unfinished for two thousand years. With the help of a graduate student and an enigmatic Roman Catholic priest, the two detectives do more than fight for their lives. .THEY FIGHT FOR US ALL.


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The definitive biography of Robert Redford.He has appeared on stage and screen, in front of and behind the camera, earning Academy, Golden Globe, and other awards and nominations for his acting, directing, and producing. His Sundance Film Festival transformed the world of filmmaking. He is among the most widely admired Hollywood stars of his generation. But only now, with this revelatory biography, will we see behind the Hollywood facade to the surprising and complex man.Redford made available to Michael Feeney Callan his personal papers: journals, script notes, correspondence, hundreds of hours of taped interviews. Here is his family background and childhood, his rocky start in acting, the death of his son, his star-making relationship with director Sydney Pollack, the establishment of Sundance, his political involvement, artistic successes and failures, friendships and romances. Here is a portrait of a man whose iconic roles on screen (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Natural) and directorial brilliance (Ordinary People, Quiz Show) have both defined and obscured one of the most celebrated, and until now least understood, public figures of our time.


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<p class="description">Many hugely successful people never finished college-what did they figure out that others didn't? Everyone knows that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to start the companies that would make them billionaires and change the world. But there are plenty of others who figured out a path to real success without finishing college. Michael Ellsberg interviewed a wide array of self- educated successes, from self-made billionaire John Paul DeJoria, who took himself from homelessness to vast wealth in hair care, to Felix Dennis, founder of Maxim, which revolutionized magazines, to Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, which revolutionized the Web. Ellsberg draws on these entrepreneurs for their most powerful insights and highlights the key principles they rely on for educating themselves and achieving success in the real world. He shows you: • The mind-set that separates self-made entrepreneurs from cubicle- jockeys and middle-managers • How to design a career that earns you money while connecting with your deepest passion • The secret to connecting with high-powered, influential mentors.</p>


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<p>With technologies and weapon systems torn from the pages of DARPA's most advanced military programs, DOMINANT SPECIES is an explosive roller-coaster of futuristic military action. This fast-paced, character-driven novel will immerse you in the world of lethal powered armor aboard a ghostly abandoned starship buried miles underground. Somewhere amid the twisted, frozen decks, a group of elite Marines will find themselves trapped in an ancient mystery and a life-or-death battle to see who really is... the DOMINANT SPECIES. </p>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; "><em>Washington Post</em> reporter Dobbs is a master at telling stories as they unfold and from a variety of perspectives. In this re-examination of the 1963 Bay of Pigs face-off between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., Dobbs combines visits to Cuba, discussions with Russian participants and fingertip command of archival and printed U.S. sources to describe a wild ride that—contrary to the myth of Kennedy's steel-nerved crisis management—was shaped by improvisation, guesswork and blind luck. Dobbs's protagonists act not out of malevolence, incompetence or machismo. Kennedy, Khrushchev and their advisers emerge as men desperately seeking a handle on a situation no one wanted and no one could resolve. In a densely packed, fast-paced, suspenseful narrative, Dobbs presents the crisis from its early stages through the decision to blockade Cuba and Kennedy's ordering of DEFCON 2, the last step before an attack, to the final resolution on October 27 and 28. The work's climax is a detailed reconstruction of the dry-mouthed, sweaty-armpits environment of those final hours before both sides backed down. From first to last, this sustains Dobbs's case that crisis management is a contradiction in terms. </span></h3>


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The story of one of the most important and beloved shows on television-how it got started, nearly failed, and was saved by Elmo When the first episode aired on November 10, 1969, Sesame Streetrevolutionized the way education was presented to children on television. It has since become the longest-running children's show in history, and today reaches 8 million preschoolers on 350 PBS stations and airs in 120 countries. Street Gangis the compelling and often comical story of the creation and history of this media masterpiece and pop culture landmark, told with the cooperation of one of the show's cofounders, Joan Ganz Cooney. Sesame Streetwas born as the result of a discussion at a dinner party at Cooney's home about the poor quality of children's programming and hit the air as a big bang of creative fusion from Jim Henson and company, quickly rocketing to success. Street Gangtraces the evolution of the show from its inspiration in the civil rights movement through its many ups and downs-from Nixon's trying to cut off its funding to the rise of Elmo-via the remarkable personalities who have contributed to it. Davis reveals how Sesame Streethas taught millions of children not only their letters and numbers, but also cooperation and fair play, tolerance and self-respect, conflict resolution, and the importance of listening. This is the unforgettable story of five decades of social and cultural change and the miraculous creative efforts, passion, and commitment of the writers, producers, directors, animators, and puppeteers who created one of the most influential programs in the history of television.


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<p class="description">As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piñata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.</p>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">How a photon can be in two places at once is just one of the conundrums of quantum physics that Fayer (Elements of Quantum Mechanics) helps to unravel. The Stanford University Professor of Chemistry provides a roadmap for non-scientific readers who wish to understand the subject but lack advanced mathematical training. Fayer's belief that our everyday experiences "teach us to think in terms of classical physics" helps him easily breach the leap from playing ball to understanding how the earth orbits the sun. But because what we learn as children "prepares us to view nature in a manner that is fundamentally wrong," most people are at a loss when probing seemingly simple questions: "Why are cherries red and blueberries blue?" While the large objects treated in classical physics can be measured without appreciable disturbance, the same is not true at the quantum level. We may take the color and size of fruit for granted, but Fayer illustrates the ways in which "the natural world is driven by quantum phenomena" with a serious, accessible treatment of a complex and fascinating subject. </span></h3></div>


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<div><p>In this celebration of one of America's oldest towns (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, author of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning <em>The Hours</em>, brings us Provincetown, one of the most idiosyncratic and extraordinary towns in the United States, perched on the sandy tip at the end of Cape Cod.  </p><p>Provincetown, eccentric, physically remote, and heartbreakingly beautiful, has been amenable and intriguing to outsiders for as long as it has existed. "It is the only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children," says Cunningham. "It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into. It is the Morocco of North America, the New Orleans of the north."  </p><p>He first came to the place more than twenty years ago, falling in love with the haunted beauty of its seascape and the rambunctious charm of its denizens. Although Provincetown is primarily known as a summer mecca of stunning beaches, quirky shops, and wild nightlife, as well as a popular destination for gay men and lesbians, it is also a place of deep and enduring history, artistic and otherwise. Few towns have attracted such an impressive array of artists and writers--from Tennessee Williams to Eugene O'Neill, Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell--who, like Cunningham, were attracted to this finger of land because it was . . . different, nonjudgmental, the perfect place to escape to; to be rescued, healed, reborn, or simply to live<br>in peace. As we follow Cunningham on his various excursions through Provincetown and its surrounding landscape, we are drawn intoits history, its mysteries, its peculiarities--places you won't read about in any conventional travel guide. </p></div>


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In an Arizona desert a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. Halfway around the world archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology. Now this group is about to get a chance not to study the past but to enter it. And with history opened to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survival–six hundred years ago. . . .


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From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and, with anodd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.


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"HARROWING THRILLS . . . FAST-PACED AND ENGAGING."--PeopleIt is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end--the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, the island indefinitely closed to the public.There are rumors that something has survived. . . . "ACTION-PACKED."--New York Daily News"FAST AND GRIPPING."--The Washington Post Book World"A VERY SCARY READ."--Entertainment Weekly"AN EDGE-OF-THE-SEAT TALE."--St. Petersburg Times


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<p class="description">The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to "collect organisms and dust for study." One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona. Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town's inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks.</p>


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<div><p>Lavish wealth and appalling poverty live side by side in Victorian London—and Edward Pierce easily navigates both worlds. Rich, handsome, and ingenious, he charms the city's most prominent citizens even as he plots the crime of his century, the daring theft of a fortune in gold. But even Pierce could not predict the consequences of an extraordinary robbery that targets the pride of England's industrial era: the mighty steam locomotive. </p><p>Based on remarkable fact, and alive with the gripping suspense, surprise, and authenticity that are his trademarks, Michael Crichton's classic adventure is a breathtaking thrill-ride that races along tracks of steel at breakneck speed. </p></div>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">Harry has a problem. Ever since getting in a car accident, he's suffered from "thought seizures," violent fits in which he attacks other people. He used to be an artificial intelligence researcher, which may explain why he targets anyone who either works on machines or who acts like a machine--mechanics, gas-station attendants, prostitutes, exotic dancers. But there's hope: he can become part machine himself, undergoing "Stage 3," an experimental procedure implanting 40 electrodes deep in the pleasure centers of his brain. The surgery is successful, and blissful pulses of electricity short-circuit Harry's seizures. That is, until Harry figures out how to overload himself with the satisfying jolts and escapes on a murderous rampage. One of Crichton's earliest, playing ably on '70s fears of computers and mind control. </span></h3>


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<p class="description">"A page-turner...Chichton's writing is cinematic, with powerful visual images and nonstop action. This book should come with hot buttered popcorn."NEWSWEEKA group of American scientists are rushed to a huge vessel that has been discovered resting on the ocean floor in the middle of the South Pacific. What they find defines their imaginations and mocks their attempts at logical explanation. It is a spaceship of phenomenal dimensions, apparently, undamaged by its fall from the sky. And, most startling, it appears to be at least three hundred years old....</p>


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<p>In Paris, a physicist dies after performing a laboratory experiment for a beautiful visitor. </p><p>In the jungles of Malaysia, a mysterious buyer purchases deadly cavitation technology, built to his specifications.</p><p>In Vancouver, a small research submarine is leased for use in the waters off New Guinea.</p><p>And in Tokyo, an intelligence agent tries to understand what it all means.</p><p>Thus begins Michael Crichton's exciting and provocative technothriller, <em>State of Fear</em>. Only <em>Michael Crichton's</em> unique ability to blend science fact and pulse-pounding fiction could bring such disparate elements to a heart-stopping conclusion. </p><p>This is Michael Crichton's most wide-ranging thriller. <em>State of Fear</em> takes the reader from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica, from the Arizona desert to the deadly jungles of the Solomon Islands, from the streets of Paris to the beaches of Los Angeles. The novel races forward, taking the reader on a rollercoaster thrill ride, all the while keeping the brain in high gear. Gripping and thought-provoking, <em>State of Fear is Michael Crichton at his very best.</em></p>


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During the grand opening celebration of the new American headquarters of an immense Japanese conglomerate, the dead body of a beautiful woman is found. The investigation begins, and immediately becomes a headlong chase through a twisting maze of industrial intrigue and a violent business battle that takes no prisoners. From the Paperback edition.


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<p>In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles—micro-robots—has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive. It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour. Every attempt to destroy it has failed. And we are the prey.</p><p>As fresh as today's headlines, Michael Crichton's most compelling novel yet tells the story of a mechanical plague and the desperate efforts of a handful of scientists to stop it. Drawing on up-to-the-minute scientific fact, <em>Prey</em> takes us into the emerging realms of nanotechnology and artificial distributed intelligence—in a story of breathtaking suspense. <em>Prey</em> is a novel you can't put down. Because time is running out.</p>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; ">Crichton, who died in 2008, was known primarily for such high-tech thrillers as Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain. This new novel, found in manuscript form among his papers, will come as a bit of a surprise to many of his fans. It is, of all things, a pirate novel. Set in 1665, it tells the story of Captain Charles Hunter, a privateer who’s hired by the governor of Jamaica’s Port Royal to steal a Spanish galleon and its cargo of gold treasure. Don’t expect to see Jack Sparrow in this story of pirates of the Caribbean, though: Crichton doesn’t play his pirates for laughs. And this is no typical pirate adventure, either: it’s actually a caper novel posing as a high-seas adventure. All the key caper-novel elements are here: the target, the mastermind, the plan, the motley crew, the ruthless villain, the gadgets, the twist, and the turncoat. Crichton keeps us in a constant state of suspense, never revealing quite what his hero, Captain Hunter, has up his sleeve, and the novel ends most unexpectedly. Pirate fans will love the book for its flashy characters and historical authenticity. Crime fans will enjoy the caper-novel structure and the way the author keeps them on their toes. If this really is Crichton’s final book, it’s a splendid send-off: something new, different, and daring.</span></h3>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; "><em>Micro</em> is pure Crichton. Dare I say, <em>vintage</em> Crichton, harkening back to the scientific intrigue of <em>Andromeda Strain</em>, to the exploration of the natural world covered in <em>Congo</em>, and to the adventure and thrills of <em>The Lost World</em>. As only Crichton can, he has taken a scientific concept as wild as the one he tackled in <em>Timeline</em> and exceeded in making it chillingly real. It took a clever quirk of genetics and cloning to give rise to the dinosaurs in <em>Jurassic Park</em>. Likewise, a twist of science in Micro calls forth a new horror out of the natural world—but not just one line of threat. In this book, the entire biosphere becomes a vast and deadly playground. Its depiction is both darkly beautiful and stunningly dreadful. It is a terrain as foreign as any hostile planet, yet as close as our own backyard. To tell more would ruin a great adventure that will have you looking out your window with new eyes.</span></h3><p>Similarly, this lethal and toxic terrain must be traversed by a band of gutsy heroes. But in typical Crichton style, these are not elite commandos or a highly trained black ops team. They’re simply a group of graduate students—each uniquely talented and flawed—gathered from various scientific disciplines: entomology, toxicology, botany, biochemistry. They must learn to combine resources and ingenuities to survive and ultimately thwart a danger threatening to break free into the world at large, all the while pursued by a sociopath as cunning as he is sadistic.</p><p>In the end, <em>Micro</em> has everything you’d expect in a Crichton novel—and so much more. </p></div>


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<p class="description">Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why a chimp fetus resembles a human being? And should that worry us? There's a new genetic cure for drug addiction—is it worse than the disease?   We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps, a time when it's possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars and to test our spouses for genetic maladies.   We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes . . .   Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn.   Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and the bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.   The future is closer than you think.</p>


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A wealthy entrepreneur secretly creates a theme park featuring living dinosaurs drawn from prehistoric DNA. Before opening the attraction to the public, he invites some scientists to experience the park and help calm anxious investors; but, during the visit, the security system breaks down and prehistoric creatures break out.


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Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists is mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes.   Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies -- all motionless except for one moving image -- a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur.   In San Francisco, primatologist Peter Elliot works with Amy, a gorilla with an extraordinary vocabulary of 620 "signs," the most ever learned by a primate, and she likes to fingerpaint. But recently, her behavior has been erratic and her drawings match, with stunning accuracy, the brittle pages of a Portuguese print dating back to 1642 . . . a drawing of an ancient lost city. A new expedition -- along with Amy -- is sent into the Congo where they enter a secret world, and the only way out may be through a horrifying death . . .


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A brutal struggle in the cutthroat computer industry; a shattering psychological game of cat and mouse; an accusation of sexual harassment that threatens to derail a brilliant career...this is the electrifying core of Michael Crichton's new novel, the first since Rising Sun.At the center: Tom Sanders, an up-and-coming executive with DigiCom in Seattle, a man whose corporate future is certain. Until: after a closed-door meeting with his new boss -- a woman who was his lover ten years before, a woman who has been promoted to the position he expected to have -- he is accused of sexually harassing her. Now he finds himself trapped between what he knows to be true and what he knows others will assume to be the truth. And, as he uncovers an electronic trail into the company's secrets, he begins to grasp just how cynical and manipulative an abuse of truth has actually occurred...Tackling one of the most divisive issues of our time, Disclosure compels us to see beyond our traditional responses. It is Michael Crichton at his best.Michael Crichton's novels include The Terminal Man, Congo, Sphere, Jurassic Park, and Rising Sun.From the Trade Paperback edition.


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The year is A.D. 922. A refined Arab courtier, representative of the powerful Caliph of Baghdad, encounters a party of Viking warriors who are journeying to the barbaric North. He is appalled by their Viking customs—the wanton sexuality of their pale, angular women, their disregard for cleanliness . . . their cold-blooded human sacrifices. But it is not until they reach the depths of the Northland that the courtier learns the horrifying and inescapable truth: He has been enlisted by these savage, inscrutable warriors to help combat a terror that plagues them—a monstrosity that emerges under cover of night to slaughter the Vikings and devour their flesh . . .


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A Case of Need is Michael Crichton's award-winning debut novel, written shortly after he completed his medical internship. Set against the ever-building pressure and pace of a large Boston medical center, the tensions flare-and explode-when a surgical operation tragically ends in death, raising countless questions. Was it accidental malpractice? A violation of the Hippocratic oath? Or cold-blooded murder?


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Cassie Black is an ex-con who needs to make one more score in order to fulfill the dream that sustained her in prison. Cassie Black has never looked back. She walked away from her life as a criminal after one disastrous night that left the man closest to her dead and her life in a shambles. Now she's thriving at a job selling Porsches to Hollywood hotshots. Through everything - even her darkest moments - she has been able to keep going by holding on to one perfect thing, her greatest secret, dearer to her than life itself. When that secret is threatened, Cassie tosses her new life away like a bad hand of cards and goes back in a sprint to her old line of work. Her trade was robbing casino gamblers, and she was the very best. Now it's the only way she can make enough money fast to maybe make everything right. Quickly she lines up a mark, a man who has been winning steadily for a week at high-stakes baccarat. The job goes smoothly until she opens his briefcase ... And discovers a world of trouble she never dreamed of. Her superstitious friend who lined up the job says it's the bad-luck void moon having its malignant way. Cassie knows it's worse. She's crossed paths again with her life's nemesis, the man who destroyed everything six years before. He's Jack Karch, a private investigator by day who does bloody work for casino owners by night. Walking back into his sights is the worst thing that's ever happened to Cassie. Getting out alive will take all her skill and luck and faith in that one good thing ...


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<p class="description">Three passengers are dead. Fifty-six are injured. The interior cabin virtually destroyed. But the pilot manages to land the plane. . . . At a moment when the issue of safety and death in the skies is paramount in the public mind, a lethal midair disaster aboard a commercial twin-jet airliner bound from Hong Kong to Denver triggers a pressured and frantic investigation. AIRFRAME is nonstop reading: the extraordinary mixture of super suspense and authentic information on a subject of compelling interest that has been a Crichton landmark since The Andromeda Strain.</p>


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Back on the job after an involuntary leave of absence, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch lands his first case: a Hollywood producer found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, shot twice in the head. It looks like "trunk music," a Mafia hit.The LAPD's organized crime unit is oddly uninterested, but Harry thinks they're wrong. He follows the money trail from the producer's office to Las Vegas, where he quickly finds evidence of Mafia involvement. But something about the case doesn't add up, and Harry follows a string of odd clues - glitter in the producer's cuffs, an over-the-counter medication in the Rolls's glovebox - in a different direction entirely.Just when Harry thinks he's on firm ground, the bottom falls out. Blindsided again and again, at odds with his superiors, and overwhelmed by a romance that has cropped up in the middle of the case, Harry is as off balance as he's ever been.


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<p class="description">Jack McEvoy is at the end of the line as a crime reporter. Forced to take a buy-out from the LA Times, he's got 30 days left on the job. His last assignment? Training his replacement, a low-cost reporter just out of J-school. But Jack has other plans for his exit. He is going to go out with a bang - a final story that will win the newspaper journalism's highest honour - a Pulitzer prize. Jack focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer from the projects who has confessed to police that he brutally raped and strangled one of his crack clients. But as Jack delves into the story he soon realises that Alonzo's so-called confession is bogus. The investigation leads him to a killer known as The Scarecrow who has worked completely below the police and FBI radar.Jack is soon off and running on the biggest story he's had since The Poet crossed his path twelve years before - but The Scarecrow knows he's coming...</p>


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Longtime defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to change stripes and prosecute the high-profile retrial of a brutal child murder. After 24 years in prison, convicted killer Jason Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence. Haller is convinced Jessup is guilty, and he takes the case on the condition that he gets to choose his investigator, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. Together, Bosch and Haller set off on a case fraught with political and personal danger. Opposing them is Jessup, now out on bail, a defense attorney who excels at manipulating the media, and a runaway eyewitness reluctant to testify after so many years. With the odds and the evidence against them, Bosch and Haller must nail a sadistic killer once and for all. If Bosch is sure of anything, it is that Jason Jessup plans to kill again.


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<p class="description">With his four Harry Bosch novels, Michael Connelly joined "the top rank of a new generation of crime writers" (Los Angeles Times). Now Connelly returns with his most searing thriller yet - a major new departure that recalls the best work of Thomas Harris (Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs) and James Patterson (Along Came a Spider).Our hero is Jack McEvoy, a Rocky Mountain News crime-beat reporter. As the novel opens, Jack's twin brother, a Denver homicide detective, has just killed himself. Or so it seems. But when Jack begins to investigate the phenomenon of police suicides, a disturbing pattern emerges, and soon suspects that a serial murderer is at work - a devious cop killer who's left a coast-to-coast trail of "suicide notes" drawn from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. It's the story of a lifetime - except that "the Poet" already seems to know that Jack is trailing him. . .Here is definitive proof that Michael Connelly is among the best suspense novelist working today.</p>


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<p class="description">An execution on the overlook above the Mulholland Dam entangles Bosch with F.B.I. Agent Rachel Walling and Homeland Security. In his first case since he left the LAPD's Open Unsolved Unit for the prestigious Homicide Special squad, Harry Bosch is called out to investigate a murder that may have chilling consequences for national security. A doctor with access to a dangerous radioactive substance is found murdered on the overlook above the Mulholland Dam. Retracing his steps, Harry learns that a large quantity of radioactive cesium was stolen shortly before the doctor's death. With the cesium in unknown hands, Harry fears the murder could be part of a terrorist plot to poison a major American city. Soon, Bosch is in a race against time, not only against the culprits, but also against the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI (in the form of Harry's one-time lover Rachel Walling), who are convinced that this case is too important for the likes of the LAPD. It is Bosch's job to prove them all wrong. The Overlook was originally serialized in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. This novel includes material that was not published in the magazine, including new characters and more obstacles in Harry Bosch's path.</p>


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<div><p>FBI agent Rachel Walling finally gets the call she's dreaded for years, the one that tells her the Poet has surfaced. She has never forgotten the serial killer who wove lines of poetry in his hideous crimes--and apparently he has not forgotten her.<br>Former LAPD detective Harry Bosch gets a call, too--from the widow of an old friend. Her husband's death seems natural, but his ties to the hunt for the Poet make Bosch dig deep. Arriving at a derelict spot in the California desert where the feds are unearthing bodies, Bosch joins forces with Rachel. Now the two are at odds with the FBI...and squarely in the path of the Poet, who will lead them on a wicked ride out of the heat, through the narrows of evil, and into a darkness all his own...</p></div>


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<div><h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; ">Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers - they're all on Mickey Haller's client list. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence, it's about negotiation and manipulation. Sometimes it's even about justice.</span></h3><p>A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of his career. Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in his arsenal - this time to save his own life.</p></div>


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<div><p>Harry attacked his commanding officer and is suspended indefinitely, pending a psychiatric evaluation. At first he resists the LAPD shrink, but finally recognizes that something is troubling him and has for a long time. In 1961, when Harry was twelve, his mother, a prostitute, was brutally murdered, and no one has ever been accused of the crime.<br></p><p>With the spare time a suspension brings, Harry opens up the thirty-year-old file on the case and is irresistibly drawn into a past he has always avoided. It's clear that the case was fumbled and the smell of a cover-up is unmistakable. Someone powerful was able to divert justice and Harry vows to uncover the truth. As he relentlessly follows the broken pieces of the case, the stirred interest causes new murders and pushes Harry to the edge of his job... and his life.</p></div>


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<div><p>For the first time in one volume, the three novels that introduced Michael Connelly's great LAPD homicide detective, maverick Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch. The Black Echo (Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel) For Harry Bosch-hero, loner, nighthawk-the body stuffed in a drainpipe off Mulholland Drive isn't just another statistic. This one is personal. Billy Meadows was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat," fighting the VC and the fear they used to call the Black Echo. Harry let Meadows down once. He won't do it again. The Black Ice The corpse in the hotel room seems to be that of a missing LAPD narcotics officer. Rumors abound that the cop had crossed over-selling a new drug called Black Ice. Now Harry's making some dangerous connections, leading from the cop to a string of bloody murders, and from Hollywood Boulevard's drug bazaar to Mexico's dusty back alleys. In this lethal game, Harry is likely to be the next victim. The Concrete Blonde When Harry Bosch shot and killed Norman Church, the police were convinced it marked the end of the hunt for the Dollmaker-L.A.'s most bizarre serial killer. But now Church's widow is accusing Harry of killing the wrong man-a charge that rings terrifyingly true when a new victim is discovered with the Dollmaker's macabre signature. For the second time, Harry must hunt the murderer down, before he strikes again. Together, these three novels are the perfect way to discover, or rediscover, the sleuth the New York Times Book Review called a "wonderful, old-fashioned hero who isn't afraid to walk through the flames.</p></div>


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<div><p><strong>The Last Coyote: </strong>LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch is suspended from the force for attacking his commanding officer. Unable to remain idle, he investigates the long-unsolved murder of a Hollywood prostitute.<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Trunk Music: </strong>Harry returns to the force to investigate the murder of a movie producer with Mafia ties. Up against both the LAPD's organized crime unit and the mob, Harry follows the money trail to Las Vegas, where the case becomes personal.<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Angels Flight: </strong>The murder of a prominent African-American attorney who made his career suing the police for racism and brutality means that Harry's friends and associates have become suspects; and he must work closely with longtime enemies suspicious of his maverick ways to investigate them. </p></div>


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<h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 11px; ">Connelly's compelling fourth legal thriller featuring Mickey Haller (after Reversal) finds the maverick L.A. lawyer who uses his Lincoln town car as an office specializing in "foreclosure defense." Haller's first foreclosure client, Lisa Trammel, is fighting hard to keep her home, maybe too hard. The bank has gotten a restraining order to stop Trammel's protests, and she becomes the prime suspect when Mitchell Bondurant, a mortgage banker, is killed with a hammer in his office parking lot. A ton of evidence points to Trammel, but Haller crafts an impressive defense that includes "the fifth witness" of the title. Connelly has a sure command of the legal and procedural details of criminal court, and even manages to make the arcane, shady world of foreclosure interesting. While the prose may lack some of the poetic nuance of his early novels, the plot is worthy of a master storyteller. T</span></h3>


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The Dollmaker was the name of the serial killer who had stalked Los Angeles ruthlessly, leaving grisly calling cards on the faces of his female victims. Now with a single faultless shot, Detective Harry Bosch thinks he has ended the city's nightmare. But the dead man's widow is suing Harry and the LAPD for killing the wrong man-- an accusation that rings terrifyingly true when a new victim is discovered with the Dollmaker's macabre signature. So for the second time, Harry must hunt down a death-dealer who is very much alive, before he strikes again. It's a blood-tracked quest that will take Harry from the hard edges of the L.A. night to the last place he ever wanted to go-- the darkness of his own heart. With The Concrete Blonde, Edgar Award-winning author Michael Connelly has hit a whole new level in his career, creating a breathtaking thriller that thrusts you into a blistering courtroom battle-- and a desperate search for a sadistic killer.


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<div><p>Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two.</p><p>DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab's DNA cases currently in court.</p><p>Then Bosch and his partner are called to a death scene fraught with internal politics. Councilman Irvin Irving's son jumped or was pushed from a window at the Chateau Marmont. Irving, Bosch's longtime nemesis, has demanded that Harry handle the investigation.</p><p>Relentlessly pursuing both cases, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a killer operating unknown in the city for as many as three decades, and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department. </p></div>


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<p class="description">Harry Bosch is back with a badge. Teaming with former partner Kizmin Rider, Harry is assigned to the Open-Unsolved team. After three years out of the LAPD, Harry Bosch returns, to find the department a different place from the one he left. A new Police Chief has been brought over from New York to give the place a thorough clean up from top to bottom. Working with his former partner, Kiz Rider, Harry is assigned to the department's Open-Unsolved Unit, working on the thousands of cold cases that haunt the LAPD's files. These detectives are the Closers - they put a shovel in the dirt and turn over the past. By applying new techniques to old evidence they aim to unearth some hidden killers and bring them to justice, for 'a city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost.' Harry and Kiz are given a politically sensitive case when a DNA match connects a white supremacist to the 1988 murder of Rebecca Verloren, a sixteen-year-old girl. Becky was of mixed race, and the case appears to have a racial angle. This was LA before the riots and Rodney King; the city was a powder keg waiting for a match. The detectives who worked the case all those years ago seem to have done a decent job, but something doesn't fit. Meanwhile Harry's nemesis, Deputy Chief Irving, is watching him. In the new 'clean' LAPD Irving has been sidelined to a meaningless job. Compelled by vengeance, he hopes that Harry will make a slip.</p>


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<div><p>Things are finally looking up for defense attorney Mickey Haller. After two years of wrong turns, Haller is back in the courtroom. When Hollywood lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his biggest case yet: the defense of Walter Elliott, a prominent studio executive accused of murdering his wife and her lover. But as Haller prepares for the case that could launch him into the big time, he learns that Vincent's killer may be coming for him next.<br></p><p>Enter Harry Bosch. Determined to find Vincent's killer, he is not opposed to using Haller as bait. But as danger mounts and the stakes rise, these two loners realize their only choice is to work together.</p></div>


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<p><strong>In the new thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly, Detective Harry Bosch and his rookie partner investigate a cold case that gets very hot... very fast.</strong>  </p><p>In the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit, not many murder victims die a decade after the crime. So when a man succumbs to complications from being shot by a stray bullet ten years earlier, Bosch catches a case in which the body is still fresh, but any other clues are virtually nonexistent. Even a veteran cop would find this one tough going, but Bosch's new partner, Detective Lucia Soto, has no homicide experience. A young star in the department, Soto has been assigned to Bosch so that he can pass on to her his hard-won expertise.</p><p>Now Bosch and Soto are tasked with solving a murder that turns out to be highly charged and politically sensitive. Beginning with the bullet that has been lodged for years in the victim's spine, they must pull new leads from years-old evidence, and these soon reveal that the shooting was anything but random.</p><p>As their investigation picks up speed, it leads to another unsolved case with even greater stakes: the deaths of several children in a fire that occurred twenty years ago. But when their work starts to threaten careers and lives, Bosch and Soto must decide whether it is worth risking everything to find the truth, or if it's safer to let some secrets stay buried.</p><p>In a swiftly-moving novel as relentless and compelling as its hero, Michael Connelly shows once again why Harry Bosch is "one of the most popular and enduring figures in American crime fiction" (<em>Chicago Tribune</em>).</p><h3>Review</h3><p>As ever in Michael Connelly's work, Los Angeles - a city in which 'no matter how close it something looked, it was still far away' - is a character in its own right. And the jazz soundtrack - 'plaintive and sad but ... with an undeniable underlying hope' - makes The Burning Room a superb swansong. EVENING STANDARD It's a good story, but crucially The Burning Room shows Bosch on top form, his age no impediment to his stubbornness nor his professional insights -- Marcel Berlins THE TIMES what Connelly delivers here - as ever - is a slice of classy, clever, page-turning stuff, as Bosch and his excellent new sidekick trace the shadows of years-old crimes whose tendrils stretch through the echelons of LA society and across the sprawl of its geography. The detective is described by his boss - 'the one that knows the most in the troop. Has all the experience.' Connelly, too, is a pair of eminently safe hands, and The Burning Room is a pleasure to read. -- Alison Flood THE OBSERVER Connelly weaves his story as deftly as always, never slackening the tension DAILY EXPRESS Connelly has lost none of his fire, nor his desire to take his readers by the throat and never let them go DAILY MAIL a master of narrative tension, complex but believable plotting and three-dimensional characters ... his latest novel maintains the same high standard and relentless impetus that keeps one turning the pages. THE SPECTATOR a taut and believable tale set in a grimly recognisable world where those at the top - be they career politicians or career criminals - share a disregard for the lives of those they exploit. MAIL ON SUNDAY EVENT MAGAZINE A master at construction, Connelly finds a way to link the two cases, which burrow deep into Los Angeles's Latino community. As often happens in Connelly's police procedurals, Bosch's meticulously built case is undermined by political corruption in high places, leaving him 'suddenly sick to death of everything'. SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>A former police reporter for the LOS ANGELES TIMES, Michael Connelly is the author of the Harry Bosch thriller series as well as several stand-alone bestsellers, including the highly acclaimed legal thriller, THE LINCOLN LAWYER, selected for the Richard &amp; Judy Book Club. Michael Connelly has been President of the Mystery Writers of America. His books have been translated into 31 languages and have won awards all over the world, including the EDGAR and ANTHONY AWARDs. He lives in Tampa, Florida, with his family. </p>


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<p class="description">Harry Bosch investigates the drug-trafficking underworlds of inner city Los Angeles and the wastelands of Mexico. When a body is found in a hotel room, the press soon pick up on the case: it appears to be the body of a missing LAPD narcotics officer, apparently gone to the bad. The rumours were that he had been selling a new drug called Black Ice that had been infiltrating Los Angeles from Mexico. The LAPD are quick to declare the death as a suicide, but Harry Bosch is not so sure. There are odd, unexplained details from the crime scene which just don't add up. Fighting an attraction to the cop's widow, Bosh starts his own maverick investigation, which soon leads him over the borders, and into a dangerous world of shifting identities and deadly corruption...</p>


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<div><p>For maverick Lapd homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal...because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit. Pitted against enemies inside his own department and forced to make the agonizing choice between justice and vengeance, Bosch goes on the hunt for a killer whose true face will shock?</p></div>


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<div><p>In a case that spans 20 years, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to a file from 1992, the killing of a young female photographer during the L.A. riots. Harry originally investigated the murder, but it was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved.<br></p><p>Now Bosch's ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue. Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the "black box," the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together.</p></div>


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<div><p>LAPD Detective Harry Bosch as we've never seen him before, in three never-before-collected stories.<br></p><p>In "Suicide Run," the apparent suicide of a beautiful young starlet turns out to be much more sinister than it seems. In "Cielo Azul," Bosch is haunted by a long-ago closed case -- the murder of a teenage girl who was never identified. As her killer sits on death row, Bosch tries one last time to get the answers he has sought for years. In "One Dollar Jackpot," Bosch works the murder of a professional poker player whose skills have made her more than one enemy. <br></p><p>Whether investigating a cold case or fresh blood, Bosch relentlessly pursues his quarry, always on the lookout for the "tell." In this first collection of Harry Bosch stories, Michael Connelly once again demonstrates that he is the master of "fast-paced, brilliantly plotted crime fiction.... Harry Bosch is back on the case, and not a moment too soon" (<em>Chicago Sun Times</em>). </p></div>


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<div><p>LAPD Detective Harry Bosch is off the chain in the fastest, fiercest, and highest-stakes case of his life. </p><p>Fortune Liquors is a small shop in a tough South L.A. neighborhood, a store Bosch has known for years. The murder of John Li, the store's owner, hits Bosch hard, and he promises Li's family that he'll find the killer. </p><p>The world Bosch steps into next is unknown territory. He brings in a detective from the Asian Gang Unit for help with translation--not just of languages but also of the cultural norms and expectations that guided Li's life. He uncovers a link to a Hong Kong triad, a lethal and far-reaching crime ring that follows many immigrants to their new lives in the U.S. </p><p>And instantly his world explodes. The one good thing in Bosch's life, the person he holds most dear, is taken from him and Bosch travels to Hong Kong in an all-or-nothing bid to regain what he's lost. In a place known as Nine Dragons, as the city's Hungry Ghosts festival burns around him, Bosch puts aside everything he knows and risks everything he has in a desperate bid to outmatch the triad's ferocity.</p></div>


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Fed up with the hypocrisy and bureaucracy of the LAPD, Harry Bosch has retired. But the life of a retiree doesn't suit him. He has devoted himself to law enforcement out of a deep drive to see justice done equally for all. On his own, he is still drawn toward the abyss. And when he rediscovers a startling, unsolved murder among the old case files he's been poring over, he knows he can't rest until he finds the killer, with or without a badge. Moving ever further inside the remarkable character of Harry Bosch, whom the New York Post calls "the quintessential mystery book hero, " Michael Connelly takes another step closer to the classic novels of Raymond Chandler in this breakneck, relentless, and potent new novel.- Each Connelly book outsells its predecessors--he's truly a writer who's gaining momentum. City of Bones (published 4/01) hit the New York Times list at #3 and has more than 285,000 copies in print to date.- Chasing the Dime, this Fall's departure from Connelly's incredibly successful Harry Bosch series, had a first printing of 325,000 (10/02).- Connelly is his generation's answer to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and reviewers have taken note.- Blood Work was the basis of a feature film starring Clint Eastwood, released in August 2002. The novel currently has over 1.3 million copies in print.- For the first time ever, Connelly writes a Bosch novel in the first person, taking readers even deeper inside his most complex hero


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<p>In 1993 Marie Gesto disappeared after walking out of a supermarket. Harry Bosch worked the case but couldn't crack it, and the twenty-two-year-old was never found. Now, more than a decade later, with the Gesto file still on his desk, Bosch gets a call from the District Attorney.A man accused of two heinous murders is willing to come clean about several others, including the killing of Marie Gesto. Taking the confession of the man he has sought-and hated-for thirteen years is bad enough. Discovering that he missed a clue back in 1993 that could have stopped nine other murders may just be the straw that breaks Harry Bosch. </p>


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<p class="description">From #1 bestseller Michael Connelly's first career as a prizewinning crime reporter--the gripping, true stories that inspired and informed his novels. Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles. In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends--and, of course, the killers--to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath. Connelly's firsthand observations would lend inspiration to his novels, from The Black Echo, which was drawn from a real-life bank heist, to Trunk Music, based on an unsolved case of a man found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce. And the vital details of his best-known characters, both heroes and villains, would be drawn from the cops and killers he reported on: from loner detective Harry Bosch to the manipulative serial killer the Poet. Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, these pieces show once again that Michael Connelly is not only a master of his craft, but also one of the great American writers in any form.</p>


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<p class="description">The phone messages waiting for Henry Pierce clearly aren't for him: "Where is Lilly? This is her number. It's on the site." Pierce has just moved into a new apartment, and he's been "chasing the dime"--doing all it takes so his company comes out first with a scientific breakthrough worth millions. But he can't get the messages for Lilly out of his head. As Pierce tries to help a woman he has never met, he steps into a world of escorts, websites, sex, and secret passions. A world where his success and expertise mean nothing...and where he becomes the chief suspect in a murder case, trapped in the fight of his life.</p>


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<p>On New Year's Day, a dog finds a bone in the Hollywood Hillsand unearths a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but for Detective Harry Bosch, it stirs up memories of his childhood as an orphan. He can't let it go. As the investigation takes Bosch deeper into the past, a beautiful rookie cop brings him alive in the present. No official warning can break them apartor prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a few hard turns. Suddenly all of L.A. is in an uproar, and Bosch, fighting to keep control, is driven to the brink of an unimaginable decision.</p>


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<p class="description">Terry McCaleb, one of the most effective serial-killer investigators in the history of the FBI, hunts down his heart donor's killer. In Blood Work, Connelly introduces a new character, Terry McCaleb, who was a top man at the FBI until a heart ailment forced his early retirement. Now he lives a quiet life, nursing his new heart and restoring the boat on which he lives in Los Angeles Harbor. Although he isn't looking for any excitement, when Graciela Rivers asks him to investigate her sister Gloria's death, her story hooks him immediately: the new heart beating in McCaleb's chest is Gloria's. As McCaleb investigates the evidence in the case, the suspected randomness of the crime gives way to an unsettling suspicion of a twisted intelligence behind the murder. Soon McCaleb finds himself on the trail of a killer more horrifying than anything he ever encountered before.</p>


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<div><p>LAPD Detective Harry Bosch tackles three tough cases that span a legendary career in this never-before-collected trio of stories.<br></p><p>In "Christmas Even," the case of a burglar killed in mid-heist leads Bosch to retrace a link to his past. In "Father's Day," Bosch investigates a young boy's seemingly accidental death and confronts his own fears as a father. In "Angle of Investigation," Bosch delves into one of the first homicides he ever worked back as a uniformed rookie patrolman, a case that was left unsolved for decades.<br></p><p>Together, these gripping stories span Bosch's controversial career at the LAPD, and show the evolution of the haunted, legendary investigator he would become. Utterly unputdownable, they are proof that "Connelly never stops doling out the suspense....Once it grabs you in those first few pages, it won't let go of you" (<em>Boston Globe</em>). </p></div>


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<p class="description">Terrence McCaleb is asked by the LAPD to help them investigate a series of murders that have them baffled. They are the kind of ritualized killings that McCaleb specialized in solving with the FBI, and he is reluctantly drawn from his peaceful new life back into the horror and excitement of tracking down a terrifying homicidal maniac. More horrifying still, the suspect who seems to fit the profile that McCaleb develops is someone he has known and worked with in the past: Detective Harry Bosch.A Darkness More Than Night is a fresh and lightning-paced excursion into the dark side of Los Angeles and the hidden corners of the human heart.</p>


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<div><p class="description">With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &amp; Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers.       </p><p class="description">It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom.</p><p class="description">His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. </p><p class="description">As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun.  </p></div>


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<p class="description">As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, long-time friends, bandmates and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the sketchy yet freewheeling borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Archy and his wife, Gwen, are expecting their first baby; Nat and Aviva have a teenaged son, Julius. Cranky, flawed and loving each other with all the fierceness we've come to expect of Chabon characters, Archy and Nat have worked to construct lives and livelihoods that have a groove, looking to connect across barriers of race and class, and clinging to a sense of order and security through their stubbornly old-school ways.When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fourthrichest black man in America, announces plans to construct his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby neglected stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. What they don't know is that Goode's announcement marks the climax of a decades-old secret history, encompassing a forgotten crime of the Black Panther era, the tragedy of Archy's own deadbeat father--a long-faded Blaxploitation star--and the perpetual shining failure of American optimism about race.</p>


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<div><p>Combining rich historical detail and a harrowing, pulse-pounding narrative, <em>Close to Shore</em> brilliantly re-creates the summer of 1916, when a rogue Great White shark attacked swimmers along the New Jersey shore, triggering mass hysteria and launching the most extensive shark hunt in history.</p><p>During the summer before the United States entered World War I, when ocean swimming was just becoming popular and luxurious Jersey Shore resorts were thriving as a chic playland for an opulent yet still innocent era's new leisure class, Americans were abruptly introduced to the terror of sharks. In July 1916 a lone Great White left its usual deep-ocean habitat and headed in the direction of the New Jersey shoreline. There, near the towns of Beach Haven and Spring Lake-and, incredibly, a farming community <em>eleven miles inland</em>-the most ferocious and unpredictable of predators began a deadly rampage: the first shark attacks on swimmers in U.S. history.</p><p>For Americans celebrating an astoundingly prosperous epoch much like our own, fueled by the wizardry of revolutionary inventions, the arrival of this violent predator symbolized the limits of mankind's power against nature.</p><p>Interweaving a vivid portrait of the era and meticulously drawn characters with chilling accounts of the shark's five attacks and the frenzied hunt that ensued, Michael Capuzzo has created a nonfiction historical thriller with the texture of <em>Ragtime</em> and the tension of <em>Jaws</em>. From the unnerving inevitability of the first attack on the esteemed son of a prosperous Philadelphia physician to the spine-tingling moment when a farm boy swimming in Matawan Creek feels the sandpaper-like skin of the passing shark, <em>Close to Shore</em> is an undeniably gripping saga.</p><p>Heightening the drama are stories of the resulting panic in the citizenry, press and politicians, and of colorful personalities such as Herman Oelrichs, a flamboyant millionaire who made a bet that a shark was no match for a man (and set out to prove it); Museum of Natural History ichthyologist John Treadwell Nichols, faced with the challenge of stopping a mythic sea creature about which little was known; and, most memorable, the rogue Great White itself moving through a world that couldn't conceive of either its destructive power or its moral right to destroy.</p><p>Scrupulously researched and superbly written, <em>Close to Shore</em> brings to life a breathtaking, pivotal moment in American history. Masterfully written and suffused with fascinating period detail and insights into the science and behavior of sharks, <em>Close to Shore</em> recounts a breathtaking, pivotal moment in American history with startling immediacy.</p><p>Details the first documented cases in American history of sharks attacking swimmers, which occured along the Atlantic coast of New Jersey in 1916. </p></div>


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<p>Charming, engaging, and surprisingly forthright, Michael Caine gives us his insider's view of Hollywood and the story of his brilliant second act</p><p>When he was in his late fifties, Michael Caine believed his glamorous, rags-to-riches Hollywood career had come to an end. The scripts being sent his way were worse and worse. When one script really disappointed, he called the producer to complain about the part. The producer said, "No, no, we don't want you for the lover, we want you for the father." Salvation came in the unlikely form of his old friend Jack Nicholson, who convinced him to give acting one more shot. What followed was not only an incredible personal transformation but also one of the most radical comebacks in film history. Learning to accept his new role both on camera and in his own life, Caine went on to win his second Oscar, be knighted by the queen, and deliver some of his best performances to date. Now he shares the spectacular story of his life, from his humble upbringing in London's poverty-stricken Elephant and Castle, his military service, touching marriage and family life, and lively adventures with friends, to legendary meetings with fellow stars, forays as a restaurateur, and hilarious off-screen encounters from his glittering five-decade career. Caine brings his gift for storytelling and his insider's view to a tale that is funny, warm, and deeply honest.</p>


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Thrilling, true tales from the Vidocq Society, a team of the world's finest forensic investigators whose monthly gourmet lunches lead to justice in ice-cold murders Three of the greatest detectives in the world--a renowned FBI agent turned private eye, a sculptor and lothario who speaks to the dead, and an eccentric profiler known as "the living Sherlock Holmes"-were heartsick over the growing tide of unsolved murders. Good friends and sometime rivals William Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter decided one day over lunch that something had to be done, and pledged themselves to a grand quest for justice. The three men invited the greatest collection of forensic investigators ever assembled, drawn from five continents, to the Downtown Club in Philadelphia to begin an audacious quest: to bring the coldest killers in the world to an accounting. Named for the first modern detective, the Parisian eugčne François Vidocq-the flamboyant Napoleonic real-life sleuth who inspired Sherlock Holmes-the Vidocq Society meets monthly in its secretive chambers to solve a cold murder over a gourmet lunch. The Murder Roomdraws the reader into a chilling, darkly humorous, awe-inspiring world as the three partners travel far from their Victorian dining room to hunt the ruthless killers of a millionaire's son, a serial killer who carves off faces, and a child killer enjoying fifty years of freedom and dark fantasy. Acclaimed bestselling author Michael Capuzzo's brilliant storytelling brings true crime to life more realistically and vividly than it has ever been portrayed before. It is a world of dazzlingly bright forensic science; true evil as old as the Bible and dark as the pages of Dostoevsky; and a group of flawed, passionate men and women, inspired by their own wounded hearts to make a stand for truth, goodness, and justice in a world gone mad.


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<p>In this sweeping and deeply penetrating work, distinguished historian Michael Burleigh explores the nature of terrorism from its origins in the West to the current global threat fueled by fundamentalists. Burleigh takes us from the roots of terrorism in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Russian Nihilists, and the London-based anarchists of Black International to the various terrorist campaigns that exist today. He also explores the lives of people engaged in careers of political violence and those who are most affected by the scourge of terrorism. Authoritative, illuminating, and masterfully written, <em>Blood and Rage</em> sheds an unflinching light on the global threat that we are likely to face for decades to come.</p>


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<p class="description">"The author has written a truly complete reference book on options trading, from basics to strategies to taxes and theory. Newcomers to options can quickly find a clear explanation of terms or strategies they aren't familiar with, and experienced traders can expand their understanding of how complex strategies are created." -- Jim Bittman,author, Trade Options Like a Professional "For a new perspective about options, I recommend Michael Thomsett's comprehensive The Options Trading Body of Knowledge. Traders at all levels will enjoy his easy-to-read style as he explains options from A to Z. The options industry has needed a reference like this for a long time." -- Marty Kearney,Senior Staff Instructor, The Options Institute The Comprehensive, Up-to-Date Reference for Every Options Trader By Michael C. Thomsett, author of the global best-seller Getting Started in Options Illuminates virtually every technique and form of options trading--including options on futures and ETFs Helps you consistently choose the right options strategies and understand your true risks Options offer investors multiple opportunities to enhance their profits. However, options trading is complex, and the sheer scope of available strategies can overwhelm traders. Today, options can support a wide range of strategies, from high risk to conservative. Moreover, options are available not only for stock equities but also for futures, indices, and mutual funds. To trade successfully, traders need an authoritative, up-to-date guide to all the strategies available to them. Now, renowned options expert and best-selling author Michael C. Thomsett has created the definitive reference for options traders at all levels of experience. Thomsett systematically illuminates each key technique and strategy: how trades are structured, how to assess risk, and when each strategy is most applicable. For most strategies, Thomsett presents detailed tables and illustrations identifying profit zones, loss zones, and breakeven points. This book thoroughly explains how option premium develops based on various elements of value, walks through the calculation of returns on options trading, discusses how federal taxation works in the options market, shows how stocks are picked for options trading, and provides a complete glossary and additional resources for traders. Thoroughly Comprehend Options Trading Risks Systematically evaluate risks associated with markets, volatility, inflation, taxation, portfolios, and knowledge Understand All the Elements of Value in an Options Trade Master concepts ranging from time-to-expiration to implied volatility Use the Right Strategies at the Right Time Know when to use covered calls, spreads, straddles, combinations, and synthetic positions The Options Marketplace: History, Evolution, and Trends Understand both the "forest" and the "trees"</p>


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A breathtaking tale of love, loyalty, and intrigue set in the early days of World War II from the acclaimed New York Times Notable Book author of Soul Catcher, which USA Today hailed as "a marvelous historical novel"   World War II threatens to engulf the globe. The beleaguered Soviets, struggling to hold back the rising German tide, face despair and defeat daily. Yet just as all seems lost, a fearless female sniper named Tat'yana Levchenko gains fame in the Battle of Sevastopol with her remarkable composure and stunning skill. Offering hope in her nation's darkest moments, she becomes a Soviet hero, and word of her beauty and prowess eventually reaches Washington, D.C. Soon, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invites Tat'yana to visit America and tour the country with her.   For the Soviets, Tat'yana's newfound friendship with the wife of the most powerful man in the world is an opportunity to garner public support for a much-needed second front in the war—but it's also a chance to gather information about President Roosevelt's plans. Surrounded by those who would exploit her position, Tat'yana becomes a pawn in a battle for information, and she is forced to question the motivations of everyone she knows, including the American captain who has been assigned as her translator. But as quickly as she rises to fame, Tat'yana vanishes. Did she defect? Was she silenced—and if so, by whom? Decades later, a clever journalist will discover Tat'yana's story . . . and reveal the truth.   In Beautiful Assassin, Michael White delivers a heartrending story of war, betrayal, and a mother's love that can never be extinguished. Lyrical, evocative, and powerfully moving, this is a tale you will not soon forget.


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<p>The oldest Biblical manuscripts in existence, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves near Jerusalem in 1947, only to be kept a tightly held secret for nearly fifty more years, until the Huntington Library unleashed a storm of controversy in 1991 by releasing copies of the Scrolls. In this gripping investigation authors Baigent and Leigh set out to discover how a small coterie of orthodox biblical scholars gained control over the Scrolls, allowing access to no outsiders and issuing a strict "consensus" interpretation. The authors' questions begin in Israel, then lead them to the corridors of the Vatican and into the offices of the Inquisition. With the help of independent scholars, historical research, and careful analysis of available texts, the authors reveal what was at stake for these orthodox guardians: The Scrolls present startling insights into early Christianity -- insights that challenge the Church's version of the "facts." More than just a dramatic exposé of the intrigues surrounding these priceless documents, <em>The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception</em> presents nothing less than a new, highly significant perspective on Christianity.</p>


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<p class="description">From the Introduction: ?Look around,? the drill sergeant said. ?In a few years, or even a few months, several of you will be dead. Some of you will be severely wounded or so badly mutilated that your own mother can't stand the sight of you. And for the real unlucky ones, you will come home so emotionally disfigured that you wish you had died over there.' It was Week 7 of Basic Training . . . 18 years old and I was preparing myself to die. They say the Army makes a man out of you'but for 18-year-old SPC Michael Anthony, that fabled rite of passage proved a very dark journey. After soliciting his parents? approval to enlist at only 17, Anthony began his journey with an unshakeable faith in the military born of his family's long tradition of service. But when thrust into a medical unit of misfits as lost as he was, SPC Anthony not only witnessed the unspeakable horror of war'but the undeniable misconduct of the military'firsthand. Everything he ever believed in dissolved, forcing Anthony to rethink his loyalties, and ultimately risk his career'and his freedom'to challenge the military he had so firmly believed in. This searing memoir chronicles the iconic experiences that changed one young soldier forever. A seasoned veteran before the age of twenty-one, he faced the truth about the war'and himself'in this shocking and unprecedented eyewitness account.</p>


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<p class="description">SHE NEVER REALIZED JUST HOW PERFECT…Single parenthood is challenging enough for Zoe Hayes, raising a young daughter in Queen Village, a Philadelphia suburb whose homes—like its residents—have seen better days. Then comes the blustery afternoon when little Molly makes a shocking discovery while playing outdoors: a dismembered finger. HER IMPERFECT LIFE REALLY WAS…What Zoe longs to believe is a gruesome fluke quickly takes on unsettling significance. One by one, young nannies are vanishing from the neighborhood, falling victim to a shadowy killer. Uneasily drawn into the chilling case—and an unexpected relationship—by enigmatic Detective Nick Stiles, Zoe assumes she and Molly are safe. But then terror strikes close to home. UNTIL SHE FOUND IT IN JEOPARDY… Now, Zoe must accept that nobody in Queen Village is protected. A bloodthirsty predator lurks nearby, perhaps concealed behind a passing stranger’s friendly smile, a longtime neighbor’s front door—or, as Zoe fears most, perhaps even nearer than that...“Absolutely fantastic.”--Midwest Book Review“A page-turning success…hard to put down.”--Dallas Morning News</p>


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<p class="description">Welcome to your next chance.   Chaz Dominguez is a professional Babysitter in New Orleans, helping to integrate the recently deceased into their new and improved lives. Though Fresh Start has always been the only game in town, resurrection isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nine lives are all a person can get—and a powerful group of desperate, high-level Nine-Timers will stop at nothing to possess the keys to true immortality.   Now the only hope for Chaz and his family—and the human race—lies in the secrets locked away in the mind of Angelique, the beautiful, mysterious Newbie he must protect . . .</p>


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Told entirely in e-mails, this hilarious novel details the relationship between five Christian stay-at-home moms--Dulcie, Zelia, Jocelyn, Brenna, and Phyllis--and their angst against the "Martha Stewart Reborn" moderator, Rosalyn, who has issues of her own. Original.


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<p class="description">Secret instructons written in invisible ink. Cigarettes that fire bullets. Covert communications slipped inside dead rats. Subminature cameras hidden in ballpoint pens. If these sound like the stuff of James Bond's gadget-master Q's trade, think again. They are all real-life devices created by the CIA's Office of Technical Services. Now, in the first book ever written about this ultrasecretive department, the former director of the OTS gives us an unprecedented look at the devices and operations from the history of the CIA - including many deemed 'inappropriate for public disclosure' by the CIA just two years ago. Spycraft tells amazing life and death stories about this little-known group, much of which has never before been revealed. Against the backdrop of some of the most critical international events of recent years - including the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war on terror - the authors show the real techinical and human story of how the CIA carried out its most secret missions.</p>


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<p class="description">National best-selling fantasy legend Mercedes Lackey created a vivid, dynamic fusion of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of ancient Egypt with the most exciting, authentic and believable portrayal of dragons ever imagined. In the second novel in Mercedes Lackey's richly-conceived Dragon Jousters series, the dragonrider Vetch escapes to Alta, the subjugated land of his birth. There, he hopes to teach his people to raise and train dragons-and build an army that will liberate his homeland.</p>


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<p class="description">Big Apple. Bigger Problems.The success of the Forrester sisters' On the Runway TV show lands them a hot ticket to Fashion Week in New York City. Paige is determined to garner the attention of New York's top designers, but her newfound fame threatens to go to her head. Erin wants to help promote the work of some eco-minded designers, but struggles to be taken seriously. Can Paige keep her prima donna behavior in check? Will Erin's involvement hurt the people she's really trying to help? Success in the big city comes with even bigger challenges, and as the pressure grows, so does the drama.</p>


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Rule #3: Don't stare at invisible faeries.   Aislinn has always seen faeries. Powerful and dangerous, they walk hidden in mortal world. Aislinn fears their cruelty—especially if they learn of her Sight—and wishes she were as blind to their presence as other teens.   Rule #2: Don't speak to invisible faeries.   Now faeries are stalking her. One of them, Keenan, who is equal parts terrifying and alluring, is trying to talk to her, asking questions Aislinn is afraid to answer.   Rule #1: Don't ever attract their attention.   But it's too late. Keenan is the Summer King who has sought his queen for nine centuries. Without her, summer itself will perish. He is determined that Aislinn will become the Summer Queen at any cost—regardless of her plans or desires.   Suddenly none of the rules that have kept Aislinn safe are working anymore, and everything is on the line: her freedom; her best friend, Seth; her life; everything.   Faerie intrigue, mortal love, and the clash of ancient rules and modern expectations swirl together in Melissa Marr's stunning 21st century faery tale.


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<p>Leslie walked away from the Dark Court, determined to reclaim her life and live it on her own terms-even if it meant leaving behind the two faeries who love her. She knows Niall and Irial watch over her, and she would give almost anything to keep them from hurting. But she resists the pull to be with either one of them. Someone knows about Leslie-s past, however, and is intent on using her to reach the fey. And he doesn-t care who gets hurt-.</p>


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<p class="description">Leslie walked away from the Dark Court, determined to reclaim her life and live it on her own terms-even if it meant leaving behind the two faeries who love her. She knows Niall and Irial watch over her, and she would give almost anything to keep them from hurting. But she resists the pull to be with either one of them. Someone knows about Leslie-s past, however, and is intent on using her to reach the fey. And he doesn-t care who gets hurt-.</p>


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<div><p>A FASCINATING, HEARTBREAKING, AND ULTIMATELY UPLIFTING TALE OF SELF-DISCOVERY FROM THE BELOVED ACTRESS WHO EARNED A PERMANENT PLACE IN THE HEARTS OF MILLIONS WHEN SHE WAS JUST A CHILD</p><p>To fans of the hugely successful television series <em>Little House on the Prairie</em>, Melissa Gilbert grew up in a fantasy world with a larger-than-life father, friends and family she could count on, and plenty of animals to play with. Children across the country dreamed of the Ingalls’ idyllic life—and so did Melissa. </p><p>With candor and humor, the cherished actress traces her complicated journey from buck-toothed Laura "Halfpint" Ingalls to Hollywood starlet, wife, and mother. She partied with the Brat Pack, dated heartthrobs like Rob Lowe and bad boys like Billy Idol, and began a self-destructive pattern of addiction and codependence. She eventually realized that her career on television had earned her popularity, admiration, and love from everyone but herself. </p><p>Through hard work, tenacity, sobriety, and the blessings of a solid marriage, Melissa has accepted her many different identities and learned to laugh, cry, and forgive in new ways. Women everywhere may have idolized her charming life on <em>Little House on the Prairie</em>, but Melissa’s own unexpectedly honest, imperfect, and down-to-earth story is an inspiration.</p></div>


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A unique voice, Melissa Jacobs delivers a second fun–filled, food–filled novel.  Mimi's life is an open book, or rather, an open menu. A restaurant consultant, she's helped launch some of the best restaurants in Philly and around the world. And she even managed to turn her boyfriend Nick into the nation's hottest celebrity chef. But when she comes home and discovers that Nick's got a secret tongue–pierced girl on the side, Mimi realizes she doesn't have the secret to success after all.  Needing a change of pace, Mimi heads home to New Jersey. The family restaurant is failing and her brother, unknown to anyone, has made plans to sell. The ultimate Restaurant Diva, Mimi sets out to save the family business––a decision thatt leads her to two potentially perfect new men. All her life Mimi has believed that everyone has one true Soul Mate, but now she's thinking that idea should be tossed out with last night's leftovers. Maybe it's time to select her men the way she selects pastries and produce and sample all there is to offer.


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<div><p>The oldest and most universally known labyrinth existed over 3,500 years ago on the Greek island of Crete--home of the mythical Minotaur. Now, over three millennia later, walking the labyrinth has become an astonishingly popular form of spiritual and emotional growth and healing. In fact, walking the labyrinth has proven itself to be so transformative and soothing, labyrinths are now being built on school playgrounds, university campuses, hospital courtyards, and even prison grounds.</p><p>Why the sudden surge in popularity? "Walking the labyrinth fulfills six important contemporary needs," according to author and psychotherapist Melissa Gayle West: "deepening spirituality; inwardness and connection; access to intuition and creativity; simplicity; integration of body and spirit; and intimacy and community." These are tall orders, but West manages to demystify this powerful process, explaining how it differs from walking a maze and how readers can make their own labyrinths. The book's narrative and organization themselves flow as thoughtfully and compellingly as a labyrinth. The three main sections cover "Meeting the Labyrinth," "Making the Labyrinth," and "Playing and Healing with the Labyrinth." West also offers an extensive resource listing and a thorough index. This is easily one of the best contemporary guidebooks on this fascinating and evolving form of spiritual practice.</p></div>


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The girls are back for another summer of fun in the sun (and childminding), but a lot has changed since last time. Eliza is now working at a 'celebrity playground' nightclub: schmoozing with the A-List (well, serving their drinks), trying to regain her title of popularity queen, and attempting to forget all about her Big Palm Beach Secret. The others, meanwhile, are back at the Perrys looking after the kids: what with the arrival of sexy Philippe, the new French au pair, who forces Jacqui to reconsider her 'No More Boys' motto; and Mara's ex hanging around with his new Charlize Therone clone of a girlfriend, the au pairs have a lot to contend with... Will their three-way friendship survive this summer of gossip and secrets?


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SUMMER AU PAIRS NEEDED IMMEDIATELYFor four energetic children, between 3 and 10 years old.Join a NYC family for the best summer of your life inEast Hampton, July 4-Labor Day.Pay: $10,000.00Driver's license a must.Familiarity with the Hamptons, a plus.Send resumes and head shots to HamptonsAuPairs@yahoo.comMeet Mara Waters, Eliza Thompson, and Jacqui Velasco -- new au pairs for one of New York City's wealthiest families -- who will spend their summer in one of the most posh, most exclusive spots for summer summering: the Hamptons.For good girl Mara, this job is a way out of another go-slow Massachusetts summer. Eliza, New York City's former It Girl, knows this is the fast lane back to the stylish world she wishes she'd never left. And for Brazilian bombshell Jacqui, it's a boarding pass back to her American love who told her he'd e-mail as soon as he got home, and didn't. After all, how hard can an au pair job be? Slap sunscreen on the kids during the day and party at the coolest hot spots at night, right? Wrong.While Eliza is desperately trying to hide her baby-sitting job from her superspoiled friends who think she's still just as rich as she used to be, Mara's getting awfully cozy with the kids' extremely attractive older brother, Ryan. And Jacqui is heartbroken when she discovers that the love of her life may have been nothing more than a spring fling.If the girls can manage au pair duties -- all the while mastering the ins and outs of the Hamptons' social scene -- it might just turn out to be the most incredible summer of their lives. But to do it they'll have to stick together. And that's where things definitely get sticky.


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Be careful or you'll get burned.The three hottest au pairs in history are back, and this time they're ready to rule the Hamptons. Mara has all the VIPs in the hottest clubs hanging on her every word. Eliza's family is back from financial ruin; and she's got the platinum charge cards to prove it. Jacqui is newly single and ready for some steamy summer hook-ups. The girls seem to have it all this summer...but looks, as we all know, can be deceiving.Mara's living every girl's dream: playing house with her boyfriend, Ryan Perry, on his parents' luxury yacht while writing a column about night-life in the Hamptons. With a press pass to every hot event, Mara's ready to hit the red carpet and scoop even the most seasoned journalists. If only she could get a pass from Ryan, who just wants her to stay home and cuddle. Last summer's "No boys!" mantra is a distant memory for Jacqui. While the new au pair, Shannon, handles the Perry kids, Jacqui searches for some serious fun. And she doesn't have to look far: Three dot.com boy millionaires have moved in next door and are more than happy to compete for her affections. Thus Jacqui's new mantra is, "Why have just one when you can have them all?"Eliza and Jeremy are in total relationship bliss. She's decided to take the next step with Jeremy and nothing's going to stop her this time. Unfortunately, what she thought would be a cakewalk internship for a famous fashion designer turns out to be more hours of hard labor than she, or her relationship, are ready for. Too bad Jeremy won't stop questioning her work ethic long enough for Eliza to get back in the mood. The Au Pairs: Sun-kissed. Because it's soooo much more than just a job.


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<p>Set on a rugged coastal homestead during the 1970s, <em>This Life Is in Your Hands</em> introduces a superb young writer driven by the need to uncover the truth of a childhood tragedy and connect anew with the beauty and vitality of the back-to-the-land ideal that shaped her early years.</p><p>In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman's parents, Eliot and Sue—a handsome, idealistic young couple from well-to-do families—pack a few essentials into their VW truck and abandon the complications of modern reality to carve a farm from the woods. They move to a remote peninsula on the coast of Maine and become disciples of Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible <em>Living the Good Life</em>. On sixty acres of sandy, intractable land, Eliot and Sue begin to forge a new existence, subsisting on the crops they grow and building a home with their own hands.</p><p>While they establish a happy family and achieve their visionary goals, the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes at a price. Winters are long and lean, summers frenetic with the work of the harvest, and the distraction of the many young farm apprentices threatens the Colemans' marriage. Then, one summer day when Melissa is seven, her three-year-old sister, Heidi, wanders off and drowns in the pond where she liked to play. In the wake of the accident, ideals give way to human frailty, divorce, and a mother's breakdown—and ultimately young Melissa is abandoned to the care of neighbors. What really happened, and who, if anyone, is to blame?</p><p><em>This Life Is in Your Hands</em> is the search to understand a complicated past; a true story, both tragic and redemptive, it tells of the quest to make a good life, the role of fate, and the power of forgiveness.</p>


