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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In her fourth novel (after <em>The Way Life Should Be</em>), Kline traces the construction and collapse of two long-term relationships. On her way home to New Jersey after an awkward party for her lifelong friend Claire's highly autobiographical first novel, Alison gets into a car accident that kills a boy in the other car. Even though the accident wasn't her fault, Allison, a mother of two young children, is wracked with grief and guilt. Her husband, Charlie, also struggles with the impulse to blame his wife, especially as he longs for any excuse to escalate his nascent affair with Claire and end his marriage. Episodes detailing the inevitable collapse of Alison and Charlie's marriage, as well as Claire's marriage to her well-meaning husband, Ben, are interspersed with vignettes revealing the four friends' 10-plus–year history together. Shifting perspectives and thoughtful interior monologues reveal just how isolated, and in some cases misguided, the characters are. Kline's unflinching gaze and lovely prose sets Kline's novel apart from the herd of infidelity/marital ennui novels. It's well-done, thoughtful and thought provoking. <em>(Aug.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>“Christina Baker Kline is a relentless storyteller. Once she sets her hook and starts reeling you in, struggle becomes counterproductive. The narrative line is too taut, the angler at the other end too skillful.” (Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and That Old Cape Magic )  </p><p>“Kline’s razor-sharp novel about love, marriage and obligation is a beach book only because you could zip through it anywhere.” (More magazine )  </p><p>“It is both thrilling and terrifying to read this powerful new novel and think: this could be me. Christina Baker Kline takes us on an intimate journey with her characters, one that brings us dangerously close to the hidden truths about love, trust and friendship.” (Ellen Sussman, author of Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex; Bad Girls: 25 Writers Misbehave; and On a Night Like This )  </p><p>“Kline’s unflinching gaze and lovely prose set [BIRD IN HAND] apart from the herd of infidelity/marital ennui novels. It’s well-done, thoughtful and thought-provoking.” (Publishers Weekly )  </p><p>“[Bird in Hand] exhibits an unsparing eye for the telling details that reveal how people think and act.” (Library Journal )  </p><p>“Kline explores the complications of the lines and bonds between marriage and friendship with honest and complex emotions on all four narrative fronts.” (Booklist )  </p><p>“A gripping tale about two crumbling marriages, [BIRD IN HAND] offers a realistic and, at times, heartbreaking look at love and friendship.” (RealSimple.com, Entertainment Pick )  </p><p>“In BIRD IN HAND, Christina Baker Kline looks at marriage, at parents and children, pain and sorrow, and at all the questions that life asks us. This is a wise and lovely book.” (Roxana Robinson, author of Cost ) </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Despite her cushy Pasadena life and marriage to the preciously nicknamed "Milky," part-time college teacher Dahlia Chang suffers blackouts and headaches, can't remember a thing about her childhood except her mother dying suddenly and is subject to the malicious jealousy of mysterious bad girl Phoebe. Gradually, Pina (_Bliss_) reveals what the reader guesses early on—that Phoebe is an alter ego, the product of a mental trauma Dahlia suffered as a girl. Enter Dahlia's Aunt Baby, who resolves to heal Dahlia, even if it means hauling Dahlia to the plantationlike home in Dallas where she grew up to confront the past. Meanwhile, unaware of his wife's journey, Milky strikes out for Dallas on his own to investigate her mysterious condition and learns from resident grave digger Percival Tweed about Dahlia's sordid family history. Emotions drive this novel; the characters often amount to little more than convenient vehicles that speak and think in either hoary dialect or wooden exchanges. When the living and the dead finally reunite, the book picks up a small bit of suspenseful steam and becomes an affecting story about the power of family love to mend old wounds. <em>(Nov.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Dahlia Chang is suffering a crushing depression, robbing her of the joy of having a devoted husband, loving daughter, and successful career. Her past? Her family? She doesn't remember, and she doesn't want to. As her depression deepens and threatens to completely alienate Dahlia from her family, her husband, Michael, decides to visit Dahlia's family in Dallas. Sensing the danger Dahlia is in, a long-lost great-aunt, who knows the secret behind Dahlia's disappearance and 20-plus-year estrangement from the family, travels to Los Angeles to rescue her great-niece. Dahlia's secret is tied to a family history of mental and emotional instability and the fateful day that tornado Sophea wrecked their lives. Pina, author of_Bliss _(2002), delivers strong characters and an intricate plot. <em>Vanessa Bush</em><br /><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Updike compresses the strata of a life in his delicately rendered, tremendously moving posthumous collection. In Free, the memory of a life-affirming affair buckles against a man's loyalty to his deceased wife: he recognizes that becoming a well-bred stick offers more consolation in old age than the sluggish arousal of his sensuality. In The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe, the retired protagonist, depressed by what he perceives as the universe's indifference to human affairs, is done in by the accumulated detritus of his life. Many characters are haunted by a sense of isolation, such as the protagonist of Personal Archaeology, who roams his Massachusetts estate, searching for traces of previous ownership while sifting through his own petty contribution, or the emotionally stranded absentee landlord of an Alton, Pa., family farm in The Road Home, who returns after 50 years and finds himself lost in his hometown. From Kinderszenen, which depicts the anxious time of smalltown late 1930s, to Varieties of Religious Experience, in which a grandfather watches the twin towers fall, time ushers in brutal changes. With masterly assurance, Updike transforms the familiar into the mysterious. <em>(June)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Starred Review. In the title story of this miraculous final collection, the aging narrator admits, "I have never really left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, no matter how infrequently I check on its condition." Most of these stories evoke Updike's Olinger and environs at least in passing, nicely complementing the 2003 retrospective collection <em>The Early Stories, 1953–1975</em>, with its tantalizing hints of autobiography. In "Personal Archaeology," a restless retiree uncovers several distinct strata of rusty junk on his small piece of suburban land and realizes that his own lost golf balls will form yet another such layer. In "The Full Glass," an elderly man takes pride in his efficient bedroom routines, such as filling a glass with water before opening the pill bottles. In "Free," a recent widower starts to miss the wife from whom he had longed to escape. A few of the stories take place at high school reunions, where conversations resume midstream after 50 years. Like his ancient characters, Updike rambles on at times, but no one will complain. Recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, <em>LJ</em> 2/1/09.]—Edward B. St John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>

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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In this cerebral near-future novel, the first in a trilogy, Robinson (_The Years of Rice and Salt_) explores the events leading up to a worldwide catastrophe brought on by global warming. Each of his various viewpoint characters holds a small piece of the puzzle and can see calamity coming, but is helpless before the indifference of the politicians and capitalists who run America. Anna Quibler, a National Science Foundation official in Washington, D.C., sifts through dozens of funding proposals each day, while her husband, Charlie, handles life as a stay-at-home dad and telecommutes to his job as an environmental adviser to a liberal senator. Another scientist, Frank Vanderwal, finds his sterile worldview turned upside down after attending a lecture on Buddhist attitudes toward science given by the ambassador from Khembalung, a nation virtually inundated by the rising Indian Ocean. Robinson's tale lacks the drama and excitement of such other novels dealing with global climate change as Bruce Sterling's <em>Heavy Weather</em> and John Barnes's <em>Mother of Storms</em>, but his portrayal of how actual scientists would deal with this disaster-in-the-making is utterly convincing. Robinson clearly cares deeply about our planet's future, and he makes the reader care as well. FYI:_Robinson's Mars_ trilogy (_Red Mars_, etc.) received one Nebula and two Hugo awards. <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Adult/High School–An elegantly crafted and beguiling novel set in the very near future. Anna Quibler is a technocrat at the National Science Foundation while her husband, Charlie, takes care of their toddler and telecommutes as a legislative consultant to a senator. Their family life is a delight to observe, as are the interactions of the scientists at the NSF and related organizations. When a Buddhist delegation, whose country is being flooded because of climate change, opens an embassy near the NSF, the Quiblers befriend them and teach them to work the system of politics and grants. The Buddhists, in turn, affect the scientists in delightful and unexpectedly significant ways. The characters all share information and theories, appreciating the threat that global warming poses, but they just can't seem to awaken a sense of urgency in the politicians who could do something about it. (Robinson's characterizations of politicians are barbed, and often hilarious.) As the scientists focus on the minutiae of their lives, the specter of global warming looms over all, inexorably causing a change here, a change there, until all the imbalances combine to bring about a brilliantly visualized catastrophe that readers will not soon forget. Even as he outlines frighteningly plausible scenarios backed up by undeniable facts, the author charms with domesticity and humor. This beautifully paced novel stands on its own, but it is the first of a trilogy. As readers wait impatiently for the next volume, they will probably find themselves paying closer attention to science, to politics, and to the weather._–Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA_ <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p><em>Starred Review.</em> Earth continues its relentless plunge toward environmental collapse in Robinson's well-done if intensely didactic follow-up to <em>Forty Signs of Rain</em> (2004). As a result of global warming, the Gulf Stream has stalled, and when winter comes, impossibly frigid temperatures hit the Eastern Seaboard and Western Europe. As people starve, multinational corporations explore ways of making a profit from the disaster. When Antarctica's ice shelves collapse, low-lying island nations quite literally slip beneath the rising waters. In Washington, D.C., clear-sighted scientists must overcome government inertia and stupidity to put into effect policies that may begin to salvage the situation. An enormous fleet of ships is dispatched to the North Atlantic to dump millions of tons of salt into the ocean in the hope of restarting the Gulf Stream. This ecological disaster tale is guaranteed to anger political and economic conservatives of every stripe, but it provides perhaps the most realistic portrayal ever created of the environmental changes that are already occurring on our planet. It should be required reading for anyone concerned about our world's future. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Adult/High School–Picking up where <em>Forty Signs of Rain</em> (Bantam, 2004) leaves off, this second book in a planned trilogy finds Earth about to experience the most intense winter on record. Governments worldwide blithely go about their routines in spite of the monumental recent flooding in Washington, DC, and other areas around the globe. When the record-setting cold sets in, people begin freezing to death and starving due to crop failures. Large corporations and world governments use the crisis to attempt to rig elections and plan other agendas to tighten their hold on the public. Meanwhile scientists, especially those at the National Science Foundation, frantically search for a way to shift the weather patterns. The answer seems to be to jump-start the Gulf Stream to get it flowing again; the world watches as millions of tons of salt pour from ships into the ocean in this attempt. While the major plot of ecological chaos plays out, the subplots show how the effects of the weather changes, ecological turmoil, and governmental and big business assaults affect the various characters as they try to survive. This well-researched and expertly written novel about a future that might be coming true all too soon will hopefully serve as a wake-up call about Earths current serious situation._–Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA_ <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>

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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Inside-the-Beltway policy wonks and government scientists strive to save the world from environmental collapse in the well-written third installment (after 2005's <em>Fifty Degrees Below</em>) of this hyperrealistic, near-future SF series. The Gulf Stream—slowed by global warming—has been restarted and nuclear-powered naval ships stand by to generate electricity for frigid coastal cities. Phil Chase, an ecologically minded Democrat from California in the Al Gore mold, has won the presidency, due in part to the efforts of NSA scientist Frank Vanderwal and his spook girlfriend, Caroline Barr, who helped foil a right-wing attempt to fix the election. But only time will tell if the world has both the scientific know-how and the political will to reverse the ongoing rush toward an ecological precipice. Combining surprisingly interesting discussions of environmental science with Robinson's trademark tramps through nature and an exciting espionage subplot, this novel should appeal to both the author's regular SF audience and anyone concerned with the ecological health of our planet <em>(Mar.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>By the time Phil Chase is elected president, the world’s climate is far on its way to irreversible change. Food scarcity, housing shortages, diminishing medical care, and vanishing species are just some of the consequences. The erratic winter the Washington, D.C., area is experiencing is another grim reminder of a global weather pattern gone haywire: bone-chilling cold one day, balmy weather the next.  </p><p>But the president-elect remains optimistic and doesn’t intend to give up without a fight. A maverick in every sense of the word, Chase starts organizing the most ambitious plan to save the world from disaster since FDR–and assembling a team of top scientists and advisers to implement it.  </p><p>For Charlie Quibler, this means reentering the political fray full-time and giving up full-time care of his young son, Joe. For Frank Vanderwal, hampered by a brain injury, it means trying to protect the woman he loves from a vengeful ex and a rogue “black ops” agency not even the president can control–a task for which neither Frank’s work at the National Science Foundation nor his study of Tibetan Buddhism can prepare him.   </p><p>In a world where time is running out as quickly as its natural resources, where surveillance is almost total and freedom nearly nonexistent, the forecast for the Chase administration looks darker each passing day. For as the last–and most terrible–of natural disasters looms on the horizon, it will take a miracle to stop the clock . . . the kind of miracle that only dedicated men and women can bring about. </p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine, Lippman's Tess Monaghan novella turns the intrepid Baltimore PI's at-risk late-pregnancy bed rest into a compellingly edgy riff on Hitchcock's Rear Window. Lovingly tucked up on her winterized sun porch, Tess marshals her forces--doting artist boyfriend Crow, best friend Whitney Talbot, middle-aged assistant gumshoe Mrs. Blossom, and researcher Dorie Starnes--to probe the disappearance of a chic blonde green-raincoated dog walker she'd been watching from her comfy prison. Tess also takes in the missing woman's abandoned green-slickered Italian greyhound from hell, a miniature canine terrorist whose anti-housebreaking vendetta offers comic relief from Tess's threatened pre-eclampsia, her obsessive unraveling of a complex scam, and her last-trimester spats with Crow about their future. Though postpartum Tess turns alternately weepy and shrill, that condition won't last, and this entertaining romp leaves plenty of hints of detective-mother exploits to come. (Jan.) <br>(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart played a photographer who spies on his neighbors while recuperating from a broken leg. In Lippman’s latest entry in her long-running series featuring Tess Monaghan, a hugely pregnant Tess, suffering from preeclampsia, is ordered to spend the last two months of her pregnancy on bed rest. And, shades of Rear Window, it doesn’t take long for the curious and incredibly bored investigator to procure a pair of binoculars and start spying on the dog walkers in the park across the street. She’s especially interested in the girl in the green raincoat and her prancing little greyhound. When, later in the week, she spots the dog running through the park alone, she determines to track down the pet’s missing mistress. And what she finds is a guilty-looking husband with two dead wives and a dead girlfriend in his past. In addition to the central mystery, Lippman provides witty writing and a running theme on the meaning of family, and there are also welcome appearances by Tess’ independent-minded best friend, Whitney; her long-suffering boyfriend, Crow; and her ace employee, Mrs. Blossom. Another winning entry in the series. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It’s always an event when Laura Lippman, who has won every major crime-fiction award going, delivers a new Tess Monaghan story. This novella first appeared in serial format in the New York Times Magazine. --Joanne Wilkinson </p>

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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Russell's uneven debut pits hunky billionaire adventurer Rail Black against an unlikely combo of villains. Stuck in L.A. freeway gridlock, Rail is shocked to see drop-dead gorgeous Kimberly York, entirely naked, escape from a nearby van. She winds up in his Rolls-Royce and soon reveals that she possesses information of a highly sensitive nature, which has made her a target. Rail wants to help her, but his only lead is the enigmatic phrase city of war, and there's little excitement in his efforts to glean further clues from the kind of offbeat friends and colleagues that only billionaire adventurers seem to have. There's not enough action for a thriller and not enough intrigue for a mystery, and a glut of description and dialogue will leave readers snoozing. <em>(Mar.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>“The novel City of War is a first novel for Neil Russell and if this thriller is any indication of the style of writing that he has I can’t wait to read more...This is a must read for anyone who loves a smart, sexy thriller.” (Bestsellersworld.com )  </p><p>“Like a James Bond thriller, Neil Russell’s City of War takes readers on an extreme rollercoaster ride of jet set thrills and chills... It would make quite the movie.” (Bookloons.com )  </p><p>“Utterly gripping, City of War balances brutal murder, fascinating mystery, and unforgettable characters on a knife’s edge of exciting suspense that doesn’t release the reader until the last page. (Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Spymaster )  </p><p>“Neil Russell has to be one of the finest, skilled, and accomplished writers in the country, a true master of intrigue.” (Clive Cussler ) </p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>The eight uneasy, dangerous months from May to December 1940, as Britain stands isolated and Germany follows its war path. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965) has been called by historians "the man of the twentieth century." Prime Minister of Great Britain (1940-1945), Churchill won the Nobel prize for literature in 1953.</p>

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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>With the "Last Castle Rock Story" King bids a magnificent farewell to the fictional Maine town where much of his previous work has been set. Of grand proportion, the novel ranks with King's best, in both plot and characterization. A new store, Needful Things, opens in town, and its proprietor, Leland Gaunt, offers seemingly unbeatable (read: Faustian) bargains to Castle Rock's troubled citizens. Among them are Polly Chalmers, lonely seamstress whose arthritis is only one of the physical and psychic pains she must bear; Brian Rusk, the 11-year-old boy whose mother is not precisely attentive; and Alan Pangborn, the new sheriff whose wife and son have recently died. These are only three of the half-dozen or so brilliantly drawn people met in the novel's one-month time span. As the dreams of each strikingly memorable character, major and minor, inexorably turn to nightmare, individuals and soon the community are overwhelmed, while the precise nature of Gaunt's evil thrillingly stays just out of focus. King, like Leland Gaunt, knows just what his customers want. 1.5 million first printing; BOMC main selection. <br>Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Kirkus Reviews</h3><p>The old horrormaster in top form, this time with a demonic dealer in magic and spells selling his wares to the folks of Castle Rock, scene of several King novels including The Dead Zone, Cujo--and how many others? King locates his hokey Our Town in Maine, but as ever it's really Consumerville, USA, with everyone's life festooned with brand names. The cast is huge and largely grotesque, since King--wearing a tremendous cat's-smile--means to close the book on Castle Rock and blow it off the map in one of his best climaxes since Salem's Lot. Editing here is supreme. King braids perhaps a dozen storylines--with hardly a drop of blood spilled for the first 250 or so pages--into ever briefer takes that climax in a hurtling, storm-ripped holocaust whose symphonic energies fill the novel's last third. Perhaps only five characters stand out: Leland Gaunt, a gentlemanly stranger who opens the Needful Things curiosity shop; his first customer, Brian Rusk, 11, who sells his soul for a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card; practical Polly Chalmers, who runs the You Sew `n' Sew shop, welcomes Gaunt with a devil's-food cake, and buys an amulet to relieve her arthritis; her lover, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who buys nothing but is haunted by the driving deaths of his wife and son; and Ace Merrill, coke dealer in a bind, who becomes Gaunt's handydevil and gets to drive Gaunt's Tucker, a car that's faster than radar and uses no gas. As he has for hundreds of years, Gaunt sells citizens whatever pricks and satisfies their inmost desires. But the price dehumanizes them, and soon all the townsfolk vent their barest aggressions on each other with cleaver, knife, and gun: Gaunt even opens a sideline of automatic weapons. By novel's end, the whole town is on a hysterical, psychotic mass rampage that floods morgue and hospital with the delimbed and obliterated. Then comes the big bang. Mmmmmmmmmmmm! Leland King's glee, or Steven Gaunt's, or rather--well, the author's--as he rubs his palms over his let's-blow-'em-away superclimax is wonderfully catching. (Book-of-the-Month Main Selection for Fall) -- <em>Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.</em></p>

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<div><div><p>BONUS: This edition contains a reader's guide.<br><br>In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner and acclaimed author of <b>A Thousand Years of Good Prayers</b> and <b>The Vagrants</b>,
 gives us exquisite fiction filled with suspense, depth, and beauty, in 
which history, politics, and folklore magnificently illuminate the human
 condition. <br><br>In the title story, a professor introduces her 
middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student's true 
affections. In "A Man Like Him," a lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a
 man wrongly accused of an indiscretion. In "The Proprietress," a 
reporter from Shanghai travels to a small town to write an article about
 the local prison, only to discover a far more intriguing story 
involving a shopkeeper who offers refuge to the wives and children of 
inmates. In "House Fire," a young man who suspects his father of 
sleeping with the young man's wife seeks the help of a detective agency 
run by a group of feisty old women. <br><br>    Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, <b>Gold Boy, Emerald Girl </b>reveals
 worlds strange and familiar, and cultures both traditional and modern, 
to create a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.</p></div>

<h5>Excerpts</h5>
<div><i>From the book...</i></div>
<div><p><i>KindnessChapter One</i><br><br>i am a forty-one-year-old 
woman living by myself, in the same one- bedroom flat where I have 
always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is
 threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate 
developers. Apart from a trip to a cheap seaside resort, taken with my 
parents the summer I turned five, I have not traveled much; I spent a 
year in an army camp in central China, but other than that I have never 
lived away from home. In college, after a few failed attempts to 
convince me of the importance of being a community member, my adviser 
stopped acknowledging my presence, and the bed assigned to me was taken 
over by the five other girls in the dorm and their trunks.<br><br>I have
 not married, and naturally have no children. I have few friends, though
 as I have never left the neighborhood, I have enough acquaintances, 
most of them a generation or two older. Being around them is comforting;
 never is there a day when I feel that I am alone in aging.<br><br>I 
teach mathematics in a third-tier middle school. I do not love my job or
 my students, but I have noticed that even the most meager attention I 
give to the students is returned by a few of them with respect and 
gratitude and sometimes inexplicable infatuation. I pity those children 
more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in 
their lives. It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like
 me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone else's life.<br><br>I have 
no hobby that takes me outside my flat during my spare time. I do not 
own a television set, but I have a roomful of books at least half a 
century older than I am. I have never in my life hurt a soul, or, if I 
have done any harm unintentionally the pain I inflicted was the most 
trivial kind, forgotten the moment it was felt-if indeed it could be 
felt in any way. But that cannot be a happy life, or much of a life at 
all, you might say. That may very well be true. "Why are you unhappy?" 
To this day, if I close my eyes I can feel Lieutenant Wei's finger under
 my chin, lifting my face to a spring night. "Tell me, how can we make 
you happy?"<br><br>The questions, put to me twenty-three years ago, have
 remained unanswerable, though it no longer matters, as, you see, 
Lieutenant Wei died three weeks ago, at age forty-six, mother of a 
teenage daughter, wife of a stationery merchant, veteran of Unit 20256, 
People's Liberation Army, from which she retired at age forty-three, 
already afflicted with a malignant tumor. She was Major Wei in the 
funeral announcement. I do not know why the news of her death was mailed
 to me except perhaps that the funeral committee-it was from such a 
committee that the letter had come, befitting her status- thought I was 
one of her long-lost friends, my name scribbled in an old address book. I
 wonder if the announcement was sent to the other girls, though not many
 of them would still be at the same address. I remember the day 
Lieutenant Wei's wedding invitation arrived, in a distant past, and 
thinking then that it would be the last time I would hear from her.<br><br>I
 did not go to the funeral, as I had not gone to her wedding, both of 
which took place two hours by train from Beijing. It is a hassle to 
travel for a wedding, but more so for a funeral. One has to face 
strangers' tears and, worse, one has to repeat words of condolence to 
irrelevant people.<br><br>When I was five, a peddler came to our 
neighborhood one Sunday with a bamboo basket full of spring chicks. I 
was trailing behind my father for our weekly shopping of rationed food, 
and when the peddler put a chick in my palm, its small body soft and 
warm and shivering constantly, I cried before I could...</p></div>
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<h5>Reviews</h5>
<div><i>Francine Prose, <i>The New York Times Book Review, </i>Editor's Choice...</i></div>
<div><p>"A literary voice that brings to mind Nabokov's description of 
Chekhov's narrative style: 'The story is told in the most natural way 
possible...the way one person relates to another the most important 
things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly 
subdued voice.' As in reading Chekhov, one is struck by how profoundly 
important the lives or ordinary people are made to seem, and by what a 
sizable chunk of existence -- an entire life or several lives -- has 
been compressed into a few pages....[Yiyun Li] succeeds in making the 
details of a very particular (and very sharply drawn) time and place 
express something broader and more universal....[Li's stories] have the 
power to create hushed intervals that resonate with emotion....<i>Gold Boy, Emerald Girl </i>is an example of the treasure an artist can fashion from the raw materials of ordinary existence."</p></div>
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<div><i><i>San Francisco Chronicle Book Review,</i> Cover Review...</i></div>
<div>"Li's collection well deserves a celebration with its 
sophistication and honesty, which often derive from a deep understanding
 of the history, culture and politics of China, and of their impact on 
ordinary people. . . . Yes, sorrows may arise during times of 
reflection, but it's impossible not to fall in love with the privacy and
 tranquility of the time and place."</div>
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<div><i><i>Marie Claire</i>...</i></div>
<div>"With their quiet authority, exquisite control, and illumination of
 those quicksilver moments on which entire lives pivot, Li's tales lodge
 in your rib cage long after you've finished reading....[Li will] remind
 you of what it's like to be human in today's increasingly fragmented 
world."</div>
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<div><i><i>Cleveland Plain Dealer</i>...</i></div>
<div>"Breathtaking....starkly wondrous....gorgeous fiction....Yiyun Li 
writes in simple, penetrating prose....[Li] is an impresario of our 
essential loneliness.  Still, these nine stories are not sad, but 
astringently beautiful."</div>
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<div><i>Junot Díaz...</i></div>
<div>"Li is extraordinary . . . a storyteller of the first order . . . 
each tale in this collection is as wild and beautiful and thorny as a 
heart. . . Li inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and 
compassion that one cannot help but marvel at her remarkable talents."</div>
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<div><i><i>Vogue</i>...</i></div>
<div>"Masterly....nuanced....Li conjures a bewildering new economy 
China, but her eloquent understanding of people struggling to help one 
another 'make a world that would accommodate their loneliness' feels 
universal."</div>
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<div><i><i>Elle</i>...</i></div>
<div>"Delectable....subtle and assured....[Li] finds the pulse points in
 the lives of her Chinese and Chinese-American characters and renders 
her findings with empathy and exactitude."</div>
<div> </div>
<div><i><i>Time Out New York</i>...</i></div>
<div>"Li displays a staggering poise and grace in her latest collection of short stories....the yarns spun in <i>Gold Boy, Emerald Girl </i>prove to be as varied as humanity itself."</div>
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<div><i><i>New York Observer</i>...</i></div>
<div>"[Li's] writing is minimal, yet packed with detail. At times, it 
feels like she is reporting in the manner of a journalist; at others she
 teeters on the verge of lyricism, often walking this line within a 
single paragraph."</div>
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<div><i><i>Kirkus Reviews </i>(starred review)...</i></div>
<div>"A stellar assortment of stories...further proof that Li deserves to be considered among the best living fiction writers."</div>
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<div><i><i>Publishers Weekly </i>(starred review)...</i></div>
<div>"Brilliant...a frighteningly lucid vision of human fate."</div>
<div> </div>
<h5>About the Author</h5>
<div>
<script></script><p>Yiyun Li is the author of <i>A Thousand Years of Good Prayers </i>and <i>The Vagrants. </i>A
 native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is 
the recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the
 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the 
Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, <i>Granta </i>named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in <i>The</i> <i>New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American</i> <i>Short Stories, </i>and <i>The O. Henry Prize Stories, </i>among
 others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and
 lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.</p></div></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. In her debut novel, Frank (A Brief History of Camouflage) presents a slightly fantastic tale of WWII, concerning an underground German bunker where multi-lingual intellectuals, spared the concentration camps, spend the war answering letters sent to concentration camp inmates who are, in all likelihood, already dead; called the Compound of Scribes, its mission is part record-keeping, part supernatural insurance plan, meant to keep the spirits of the dead from tipping off psychics to the Nazi's Final Solution. Despite their absurd (and potentially confusing) orders, the 50-some Scribes live in relative peace under the supervision of Elie and Gerhardt, lovers secretly working for the Resistance. Then a daunting task comes down from Goebbels himself-answer a letter from genius philosopher Martin Heidegger to his friend and optometrist Asher Englehardt, a prisoner in Auschwitz-setting events in motion that will threaten the lives of everyone in the compound. Taking readers to a curiously polyglot netherworld, a population removed from the horrors of the Reich even as it deals in some of its most intimate dispatches, Frank's vision of the Holocaust is original and startling, with compelling characters and a narrative that's both explosive and ponderous. </p><h3>From</h3><p>The Nazi Briefkation (Operation Mail), which forced concentration camp prisoners to write reassuring letters to loved ones that were sent instead to a central Berlin office, provides the historic framework for Frank’s debut novel. Here the Compound of Scribes, a group of detainees selected for their language skills, answers the prisoners’ letters in their original language, a mission devised by Nazi believers in the occult to assuage the dead. At the heart of this community—housed in an underground tunnel cunningly fashioned to mimic a town—is Elie Schacten, the lover of Compound commander SS officer Gerhardt Lodenstein, who hides her Polish ancestry as she makes forays to gather supplies and assist escaping fugitives. When prominent philosopher Martin Heidegger writes fellow philosopher and optometrist Asher Engelhardt in Auschwitz, the Scribes are ordered to answer Heidegger’s letter, an operation botched by an SS flunky that leads to endangering the entire Compound. Written in the precise prose that has garnered praise for Frank’s short fiction, this surreal tale is a vivid reminder of what we must not forget. --Michele Leber </p>

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<p><meta charset="utf-8"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; "><h3 class="productDescriptionSource" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 1.23em; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 0.75em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.375em; margin-left: -15px; clear: both; ">Product Description</h3><div class="productDescriptionWrapper" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Enter Mirkwood, the Great Forest of Doubt Bold new author Steve Hillard's wildly original debut, Mirkwood, re-invents J.R.R. Tolkien as a man haunted by the very myths he rewove into his famous works. As much literary criticism as boisterous epic, this episodically-driven plot explores the blurred borderlands where ancient tales, lost heroines, and epic journeys are stalked by dim monsters that will not be still. In 1970, Professor Tolkien makes a little-known visit to America-and sets in motion elvish powers embodied in a cache of archaic documents. Destinies are altered, legends become real, and two heroines must race for their lives in vastly different worlds.<div class="emptyClear" style="clear: both; height: 0px; font-size: 0px; "></div></div><h3 class="productDescriptionSource" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 1.23em; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 0.75em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.375em; margin-left: -15px; clear: both; ">About the Author</h3><div class="productDescriptionWrapper" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">After graduating from Colorado State University, Steve Hillard earned a degree in philosophy at Columbia University and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Colorado. Before settling into his current career as a private equity entrepeneur, Hillard was a teacher at Rikers Island Prison, a welder, a carpenter, and a practicing lawyer. He is the founder and head of a private equity fund involved in the entertainment and telecom industries. Steve resides with his wife, Rosita, in Austin.</div></span></p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Diminished by dull prose, but distinguished by colorful, well-drawn characters and an arresting, labyrinthine plot, this 10th novel by Frey (after <em>Silent Partner</em>) illuminates the machinations of big business and high finance. Frey introduces Christian Gillette, who will be a continuing character in this inaugural volume of a projected series. As 36-year-old Gillette walks out of a Park Avenue church after delivering the eulogy following the suspicious "accidental" drowning of the late chairman of Everest Capital, he is nearly killed when a firebomb obliterates his waiting limo. Undaunted, newly elected chairman Gillette steps into another car and carries on with his planning: he's determined to make the company's new equity fund, Everest Eight, the biggest in the history of private equity and to eliminate his competition within the firm. Corporate chicanery, boardroom sex and backstabbing abound, and conspiracies proliferate, as Gillette enters into a deal with the chief of a mega-insurance company to increase Everest Eight's capital to $15 billion in a bold attempt to surpass rival Paul Strazzi at Apex Equity and become the nation's dominant private equity firm. Sadly, a perfunctory denouement does no justice to the clever plot. <em>Agent, Cynthia Manson. (Mar. 29)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>After the chairman of Everest Capital dies and private-fund manager Christian Gillette is elected successor, Gillette finds himself wielding previously unimagined power and exposed to equally unimagined danger (he barely averts being assassinated when his limo explodes). He doesn't mind wielding his might, first by firing one of the managing partners, then by snubbing a U.S. senator; however, accumulating enemies does not stop Gillette from planning the biggest venture fund in history. Frey does not characterize Gillette as a purely evil money-grubber; he is also shown to have a weakness for the downtrodden and gives generously to many needy families--even going so far as to buy them homes and establish trust funds for their children. Frey tries a bit too hard with this fast-paced financial thriller, and his plot contains a few glaringly implausible scenarios--would billionaire Gillette really frequent pool halls in seedy neighborhoods just to win $5,000? This is Frey's first series so perhaps the next Gillette venture will be a bit smoother. <em>Mary Frances Wilkens</em><br><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p>

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<h3>Review</h3><p>No library of western/southwestern materials can be without this book. . . . --Books of the Southwest  </p><p>This book goes far beyond biography, into the nature and soul of the American West. It is Stegner at his best, assaying an entire era of our history, packing his pages with insights as shrewd as his prose. --Ivan Doig </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>The author recounts the successes and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest. "No library of western/southwestern materials can be without this book. . . ."-- Books of the Southwest. </p>


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<h3>From</h3><p>In this collection, Eggers (_Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_) is obviously straddling the line between being a writer—and a very talented one at that—and being the spokesman for the new age of self-conscious writing. Reviewers are unanimously unhappy with a few of his literary pranks here. "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself," for example, offers up five blank pages. But when Eggers throws off our expectations and starts writing, he shines. His longer stories are original, witty, and truthful. As his characters search for transcendence, Eggers and his readers are right there with them. </p><p><em>Copyright © 2004 Phillips &amp; Nelson Media, Inc.</em></p><h3>From</h3><p>In his first collection of short stories, Eggers shows himself to be, well, serious. Gone is the charming, smirky, self-conscious narrative voice that helped make <em>A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius</em> (1999) so popular. Aside from the story "There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself," which consists of five blank pages, these short stories are unrelentingly sincere--sometimes too much so. Many of these stories feature Americans abroad--a man alone in Egypt, a woman (also alone) in Tanzania preparing to climb Kilimanjaro. In the collection's best story, "The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water," two old friends reunite in Costa Rica for a kind of loveless love affair. The accumulation of details--surfing together in the oil-wet water, an injured anteater in their hotel room--brings the story a haunting power. But some of the stories don't come together as well, and Eggers' fans may be disappointed that almost none crack a smile. Still, Eggers imagines emotionally and symbolically resonant scenes as well as any of his contemporaries, and this collection has several great ones. <em>John Green</em><br /><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p><em>Starred Review.</em> [Signature]Reviewed by <em>Nina Planck</em>Michael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. <em>Animal, Vegetable, Miracle</em> is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork. <em>(May)</em><em>Nina Planck is the author of</em> Real Food: What to Eat and Why <em>(Bloomsbury USA, 2006).</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Adult/High School–This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one's own produce but also of harvesting one's own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons. While the volume begins as an environmental treatise–the oil consumption related to transporting foodstuffs around the world is enormous–it ends, as the year ends, in a celebration of the food that physically nourishes even as the recipes and the memories of cooks and gardeners past nourish our hearts and souls. Although the book maintains that eating well is not a class issue, discussions of heirloom breeds and making cheese at home may strike some as high-flown; however, those looking for healthful alternatives to processed foods will find inspiration to seek out farmers' markets and to learn to cook and enjoy seasonal foods. Give this title to budding Martha Stewarts, green-leaning fans of Al Gore's <em>An Inconvenient Truth</em> (Rodale, 2006), and kids outraged by Eric Schlosser's <em>Fast Food Nation</em> (Houghton, 2001)._–Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA_ <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>


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<h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>This is the expose that Sinatra went to court to prevent. It's all herethe tumultuous marriages, the countless affairs, the Mafia ties, the arrogance, the drunken brawls, the sudden violence, the adulation of powerful figures, whether Mafia or presidential. This is obviously a one-sided portrait, and there are no real surprises, but Kelley has documented her facts with such thorough detail that the total effect is numbing. Barely mentioned are Sinatra's devotion to his parents and his children, and his unquestioned musical talent. This is unpleasant but compulsive reading, which most public libraries will need in order to fill demand. Marcia L. Perry, Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Mass.<br />Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"The most eye-opening celebrity biography of our  time." -William Safire, <em>The New York  Times</em>  </p><p>"A  compelling page-turner...Kitty Kelley's book has made all  future Sinatra biographies virtually redundant."  --_Los Angeles Herald-Examiner_ -- <em>Review</em></p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>First published in 1975 at the height of the back-to-nature movement, Paasilinna's charming, low-key allegory pursues a journalist abandoning his Helsinki life for the companionship of a pet hare. Approaching middle age--"the hopes of youth had not been realized, far from it"--Kaarlo Vatanen takes off after a hare he and his friend have accidentally hit while driving. He tends to the hare's leg, befriends the critter, deserts his friend, gradually sheds his former life, and eventually refits a cozy cabin in the wilds of Lapland. Paasilinna fashions in each step of Kaarlo's transformation a test of society's institutions, and finds each, not surprisingly, wanting, from law enforcement and the construction industry to the army. The hare, meanwhile, is innocently plucky, leaving his droppings on the altar of a church and in the soup of a Swedish lady. It's cute enough, if baldly obvious in the way that parables often are. (Jan.) <br />(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>A Finnish journalist and a photographer out on assignment one June evening suddenly hit a young hare on a country road. The photographer, ultimately unsympathetic, abandons his journalist companion Vatanen, who sets off to find the wounded hare. Vatanen develops a close bond with the hare and in their adventures together, they witness people's avarice, inhumaneness, hypocrisy, cruelty, participation in bureaucracy, and mere existence, rather than living, in the world. This last realization in particular is life altering for Vatanen: he quits his job, discards his hopeless marriage, sacrifices financial security, and sells his most prized possession (a boat). All this Vatanen replaces with a life of odd jobs and on-the-road experiences. This picaresque novel could simply depict a middle-age crisis, but it reaches beyond fantasy or fiction, becoming mythic in its universal themes. The story is inventive, satirical, and quite humorous. It is also refreshingly sentimental in the sense that Paasilinna reaffirms our connection with the animal world and our inherent need for happiness and freedom to maintain quality of life. <em>Janet St. John</em></p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p><em>Starred Review.</em> There's no real substitute for the sound of Sam Cooke's music, but the detailed descriptions of his recordings throughout this masterful biography are the next best thing to wearing headphones while you read. Guralnick's first book after a two-volume bio of Elvis honors Cooke's (1931–1964) musical genius, especially his ability to grasp the changing music scene of the late 1950s and early '60s. For those who only know the singer through his pop hits—"You Send Me"; "Twistin' the Night Away"—the extensive account of his childhood background in gospel music will prove fascinating, and the evocation of the harsh realities faced by African-American musicians touring the South a powerful reminder of just how explosive this music could be. Yet wide-ranging interviews reveal that behind Cooke's talent and energetic vocal style, many of his peers in the music biz saw a more troubling personality. The biography does not judge, but neither does it hold back on recounting Cooke's ruthless interactions with record companies or the deep rifts in his marriage to his former childhood sweetheart. Guralnick's revelation of the complicated man behind the music ultimately enables readers to rediscover songs like "A Change Is Gonna Come" as even more remarkable than before. Photos. <em>(Oct. 18)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Until Sam Cooke was shot dead in a Los Angeles motel, in 1964, at the age of thirty-three, his life had been an ascending series of crossover moves: he conquered the postwar gospel-music scene, scored bigger hits by moving into secular rhythm and blues, and then, after signing with R.C.A., in 1960, proceeded to go pop, and released a string of smooth, catchy singles that placed him on the cusp of mainstream superstar status. Guralnick, as in his biography of Elvis Presley, displays a feel for the culture that gave rise to the musician, and his account is a revelatory portrait of the rough-and-tumble yet familial world of black show business before and during the civil-rights era. In darker corners lurk the antecedents of today's gangster-rap subculture—racketeers who funded black record labels and tour packages, and performers like Johnny (Guitar) Watson, who made more as a pimp than he did singing. <br>Copyright © 2006 </p>

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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>"Headlong, heartsick and footsore....Frisbee sentences that sail, spin, hover, circle and come back to the reader like gifts of gravity and grace....Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere." -- _The New York Times Book Review  </p><p>_"<strong>You Shall Know Our Velocity!</strong> is the work of a wildly talented writer... Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it." -- _LA Weekly  </p><p><em>"There's an echolet of James Joyce there and something of Saul Bellow's Chinatown bounce, but we're carried into the narrative by a fluidity of line that is Eggers's own." -- </em>Entertainment Weekly  </p><p><em>"Eggers is a wonderful writer, bold and inventive, with the technique of a magic realist." --</em> Salon  </p><p><em>"An entertaining and profoundly original tale." -- </em>San Francisco Chronicle  </p><p><em>"Eggers's writing really takes off -- his forte is the messy, funny tirade, stuffed with convincing pain and wry observations." -- </em>Newsday  </p><p><em>"Often rousing ...achieves a kind of anguished, profane poetry." -- </em>Newsweek  </p><p><em>"The bottom line that matters is this: Eggers has written a terrific novel, an entertaining and imaginative tale." -- </em>The Boston Globe<br>_<br>"There are some wonderful set-pieces here, and memorable phrases tossed on the ground like unwanted pennies from the guy who runs the mint." -- <em>The Washington Post Book World</em>  </p><p>"Powerful.... Eggers's strengths as a writer are real: his funny pitch-perfect dialog; the way his prose delicately captures the bumblebee blundering of Will's thoughts; ... and the stream-water clarity of his descriptions.... There is genius here.... Who is doing more, single-handedly and single-mindedly, for American writing?" -- <em>Time</em> -- <em>Review</em></p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>In his first novel, Dave Eggers has written a moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss.It reminds us once again what an important, necessary talent Dave Eggers is. </p>

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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>"Readers will enjoy watching Tidhar's imagination throwing off sparks like a Roman candle." - <em>Publishers Weekly</em>  </p><p>"_The Bookman_ pokes at the fat and waddled body of steampunk with its walking cane and leaves it on the roadside with its fresh take on Victorian London without loosing any steam on its way." - <em>Loudmouth Man</em>  </p><p>"_The Bookman_ is a delight, crammed with gorgeous period detail, seat-of-the-pants adventure and fabulous set-pieces." - <em>The Guardian</em>  </p><p>"This is a steampunk gem... Bring on a sequel, Tidhar! I'm craving to know what happens after the ending!" - _SFF World<br>_<br>"An emerging master" _- LOCUS Magazine  </p><p>_<strong>Praise for Lavie Tidhar's Previous Works:</strong>  </p><p>"Tidhar beautifully evokes the power of technology " - <em>The Fix</em> (reviewing "The Dying World" from _Clarkesworld Magazine_)   </p><p>"...richly detailed characters in a well paced and well thought out story" - <em>Tangent</em> (reviewing "The Pattern Makers of Zanzibar" from <em>Murky Depths)</em>  </p><p>"Tidhar's story reads like a drug-infused John Le Carre novel, if Le Carre wrote science fiction and dropped LSD as he pounded on the typewriter... an amazing accomplishment, and highly recommended." - <em>The Fix</em> (reviewing "The Shangri-La Affair" from _Strange Horizons_)   </p><p>"It's stomach churning and very sweet at the same time, bizarreness and beauty like most of Tidhar's stories." - <em>The Fix</em> (reviewing "The Butcher and The Flykeeper - A Christmas Love Story" from <em>Murky Depths</em>)   </p><p>"The strength of this work is the setting. It is incredibly inventive and fun... a wonderful story, especially for those who enjoy the more surreal edges of speculative fiction." - <em>Tangent (</em>reviewing "High Noon in Clown Town" from <em>Postscripts)</em>   </p><p>"Tidhar's story is classic noir, but with its tongue firmly in its cheek from beginning to end. A very enjoyable read." - <em>The Fix</em> (reviewing "Hard Rain at the Fortean Cafe" from <em>Aeon</em>) </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p><strong>LATE EXTRA!</strong><br><strong>BOMB OUTRAGE IN LONDON!</strong>  </p><p>A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees -- there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack.  </p><p>For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how? His quest to uncover the truth takes him from the hidden catacombs of London on the brink of revolution, through pirate-infested seas, to the mysterious island that may hold the secret to the origin not only of the shadowy Bookman, but of Orphan himself...  </p><p>Like a steam-powered take on <em>V for Vendetta</em>, rich with satire and slashed through with automatons, giant lizards, pirates, airships and wild adventure. <em>The Bookman</em> is the first of a series.  </p><p>File Under: Steampunk [ Alternate History! | Reptilian Royalty! | Diabolical Anarchists! | Extraordinary Adventure! ] </p>

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<div><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Everyone hates the perfect family. So you’ll love the Battles. Mo is about to hit the big 50, and some uncomfortable truths are becoming quite apparent: She doesn’t understand either of her teenage kids, which as a child psychologist, is fairly embarrassing. She has become entirely grey. Inside, and out. Her face has surrendered and is frightening children. Dora is about to hit the big 18 . . . and about to hit anyone who annoys her, especially her precocious younger brother Peter who has a chronic Oscar Wilde fixation. Then there’s Dad . . . who’s just, well, dad. A TINY BIT MARVELLOUS is the story of a modern family all living in their own separate bubbles lurching towards meltdown. It is for anyone who has ever shared a home with that weird group of strangers we call relations. Oh and there’s a dog. Called Poo. </p>

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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>"Thanks for a wonderful childhood!" Stephen Digges tells his mother as he hugs her goodbye in front of his New York City college dorm, and it's a measure of just how persuasive and potent her account of his difficult adolescence is that we know exactly what he means. At 13, Stephen was running away, stealing his mother's car, carrying guns, doing drugs, and getting into trouble with the law and in school. Already divorced from Stephen's father, Digges saw her son's problems break up her second marriage and heard society, her family, and her neighbors tell her she was too easy on her son, that fatherless boys needed "tough love" and discipline. But Digges had the courage to listen to a highly unconventional therapist who urged her, "Join him in his anger at life.... Don't educate him about what he should have done. Let him figure it out." Together with Digges's foster son (an African American teen thrown out of his home after a stint in juvenile detention), they create a bohemian household. Three dogs (one of them epileptic) "sleep on the beds no questions asked"; Stephen does his homework with a pet mouse named Frederick in his pocket; there are swarms of kittens "leaping in and out of the windows"; and the pizza delivery for dinner may be interrupted by "phone calls from teachers, more often the cops." Go figure: creative, anti-authoritarian Stephen acquires a sense of responsibility and ambition in this offbeat atmosphere. His mother's surprisingly funny, unsentimentally tender memoir reminds us that there are no rules about raising children, just countless perils and boundless possibilities. <em>--Wendy Smith</em></p><h3>From</h3><p>At 14, Stephen was stealing cars, waving guns around his house, and running with a violent gang. But his mother, poet and memoirist Deborah Digges, did not give up on Stephen. Instead, she took extraordinary steps to save him. She "shadowed" him, disguising herself and following Stephen's nighttime escapades. She invited gang members into her home, where they smoked and played loud rap music. Enduring the disapproval of neighbors and friends, the breakup of her second marriage, and many late nights, Digges refused to abandon her son. Eventually, with the help of an unconventional therapist and the family's large assortment of pets, Deborah and Stephen grew back together, sharing a level of intimacy that is sure to be the envy of her disapproving neighbors. This is not a book of advice, and Digges doesn't offer easy answers or suggest her parenting strategy to others. Instead, it is a wrenching memoir about the things that mothers and children will do to, and for, one another, written with a poet's eye for resonant images. <em>John Green</em><br /><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p>


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<h3>Review</h3><p>"Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, <strong>With The Old Breed</strong>. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific —the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp."—Tom Hanks  </p><p>“In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge's. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals' safe accounts of—not the "good war"—but the worst war ever.”—Ken Burns  </p><p><em>From the Trade Paperback edition.</em></p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>In <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>, Victor Davis Hanson named <em>With the Old Breed</em> one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, <em>The Good War</em>. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation.  </p><p>An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division–3d Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic.  </p><p>Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill–and came to love–his fellow man.  </p><p><em>From the Trade Paperback edition.</em></p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Kimball, founder of Cook's Illustrated and host of the PBS series America's Test Kitchen, spent more than two years of "research, recipe testing, and intense planning" in order to host a Victorian dinner based on the recipes of Fannie Farmer, author of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, which was first published in 1896. Kimball is as exhaustive in his research as he is in one of his own test recipes for Cook's Illustrated, and fans of his work will appreciate his attention to even the smallest morsel of information. Kimball is off on a culinary and historical adventure as he literally traces Fannie Farmer's steps around Boston at the turn of the century, regaling the reader with a history of Boston, observations of the Victorian character, manner of dress, and cooking implements and appliances available. In the meantime, his own team has been assembled and they are methodically testing recipes and ingredients in Kimball's 1859 red-brick Boston bowfront. All this work culminates in a foodie's dream dinner party, complete with Victorian plate settings, an all-star guest list, and 12 courses you won't find in any restaurant today. A must-read for history buffs, home cooks, and professional chefs alike. <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>In the mid-1990s, Chris Kimball moved into an 1859 Victorian townhouse on the South End of Boston and, as he became accustomed to the quirks and peculiarities of the house and neighborhood, he began to wonder what it was like to live and cook in that era. In particular, he became fascinated with Fannie Farmer's <em>Boston Cooking-School Cook Book</em>. Published in 1896, it was the best-selling cookbook of its age--full of odd, long-forgotten ingredients, fascinating details about how the recipes were concocted, and some truly amazing dishes (as well as some awful ones). </p><p>In <em>Fannie's Last Supper</em>, Kimball describes the experience of re-creating one of Fannie Farmer's amazing menus: a twelve-course Christmas dinner that she served at the end of the century. Kimball immersed himself in composing twenty different recipes--including rissoles, Lobster à l'Américaine, Roast Goose with Chestnut Stuffing and Jus, and Mandarin Cake--with all the inherent difficulties of sourcing unusual animal parts and mastering many now-forgotten techniques, including regulating the heat on a coal cookstove and boiling a calf's head without its turning to mush, all sans food processor or oven thermometer. Kimball's research leads to many hilarious scenes, bizarre tastings, and an incredible armchair experience for any reader interested in food and the Victorian era. </p><p><em>Fannie's Last Supper</em> includes the dishes from the dinner and revised and updated recipes from <em>The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book</em>. A culinary thriller. it offers a fresh look at something that most of us take for granted--the American table.</p><p><strong>Praise for <em>Fannie's Last Supper</em></strong></p><p>"Chris's `Fannie' project is the most ambitious cooking undertaking I've ever witnessed outside of a restaurant opening. And as one of the devourers of the ultimate meal, I can tell you it was worth it, at least for me. (I would travel 200 miles for the jellies alone.) But the account of the making of the meal, told here in winning style, is just as impressive: part history and part contemporary journalism, it's a fascinating story, and absolutely unique." <br />--Mark Bittman, author of <em>How to Cook Everything</em></p><p>"What a piece of work Christopher Kimball has pulled off. Read this book and join the escapade into what Chris calls the most progressive era in the history of the world. No, it wasn't ten years ago, it was 110 years ago--the world of Victorian America and Fanny Farmer. Not an iota of dreamy pseudo-food history survives here. Instead, Chris challenges, provokes, entertains, and maybe even outrages our sensibilities. One thing is sure, if he gets his way, you will be rethinking some of today's accepted political culinary wisdom." <br />--Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of <em>The Splendid Table</em></p><p>"_Fannie's Last Supper_ is a splendid book with recipes and narrative that is based on a twelve-course dinner right out of the back pages of the original 1896 <em>Boston Cooking-School Cook Book</em> written by Fannie Farmer. How fantastic is that--traveling back in time to rethink the cooking of the future. A great, informative read with tempting recipes. Bravo!" <br />--Lidia Bastianich, author of <em>Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy</em></p><p>"A dynamic and entertaining book for chefs and home cooks alike. Christopher Kimball delves into the life, times, and recipes of Fannie Farmer, and creates an educational and delicious twelve-course menu that any food lover can sink their teeth into." <br />--Daniel Humm, Executive Chef, Eleven Madison Park</p>


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<div><meta charset="utf-8"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; "><h3 class="productDescriptionSource" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 1.23em; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 0.75em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.375em; margin-left: -15px; clear: both; ">Product Description</h3><div class="productDescriptionWrapper" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">America is in disarray and our economy is failing us. We have been through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, unemployment remains stubbornly high, and talk of a double-dip recession persists. Americans are not pulling the world economy out of its sluggish state -- if anything we are looking to Asia to drive a recovery.Median wages have risen only slowly since the 1970s, and this multi-decade stagnation is not yet over. By contrast, the living standards of earlier generations would double every few decades. The Democratic Party seeks to expand government spending even when the middle class feels squeezed, the public sector doesn’t always perform well, and we have no good plan for paying for forthcoming entitlement spending. To the extent Republicans have a consistent platform, it consists of unrealistic claims about how tax cuts will raise revenue and stimulate economic growth. The Republicans, when they hold power, are often a bigger fiscal disaster than the Democrats. How did we get into this mess?Imagine a tropical island where the citrus and bananas hang from the trees. Low-hanging literal fruit -- you don’t even have to cook the stuff.In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century: free land; immigrant labor; and powerful new technologies. Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are barer than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.The problem won’t be solved overnight, but there are reasons to be optimistic. We simply have to recognize the underlying causes of our past prosperity—low hanging fruit—and how we will come upon more of it.</div></span></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. When a bank teller is shot during a holdup at the start of Norwegian bestseller Nesbø's beautifully executed heist drama, Oslo Insp. Harry Hole investigates, along with Beate Lønn, a young detective with the ability to remember every face she's ever seen. Meanwhile, Harry receives a call from Anna Bethsen, a woman he hasn't seen in years. After he meets Anna, recovering alcoholic Harry awakens the next morning with a hangover and the news that Anna is dead, apparently by her own hand. While Harry quietly looks into Anna's death, he and Beate uncover ties in their bank robbery case to one of Norway's most notorious bank robbers, who's currently in prison. The deeper Harry digs, the clearer it becomes that Anna's death is linked to the robbery. Expertly weaving plot lines from Hole's last outing to feature the inspector, <em>The Redbreast</em> (2007), Nesbø delivers a lush crime saga that will leave U.S. readers clamoring for the next installment. <em>(Jan.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p><em>Starred Review</em> When Norwegian Jo Nesbo’s Redbreast landed on these shores in 2007, the acclaim was universal. Now Nesbo returns with another novel that is every bit the multitextured, complexly plotted, psychologically rich thriller that made Redbreast such an unqualified success. We pick up the life of Oslo detective Harry Hole, a recovering alcoholic whose closet is stuffed with unresolved issues concerning his obsession with his job and his inability to commit to a personal life, as he awaits the return of his new lover, Rakel, from Russia, where she hopes to be awarded permanent custody of her young son. But then he accepts an invitation to meet an old girlfriend, and suddenly he is sucked into the abyss all over again. Waking the next day at home with what appears to be a world-class hangover, he bemoans having fallen off the wagon, only to realize that’s merely the tip of the iceberg: the girlfriend has been found murdered, and his rival in the Oslo police department may be behind an attempt to frame him. Does the girlfriend’s death somehow tie in with the bank robbery and murder that he and his new partner are investigating? As Hole attempts to connect the sea of dots strewn in his path, he must battle not only his adversaries but his own demons, suddenly given new life. Nesbo manages the unlikely feat of exploring the inner life of his lead character in the thorough and compelling manner one associates with, say, Ruth Rendell, while at the same time juggling multiple, interlocking plot strands as dexterously as David Hewson. No doubt about it: Nesbo belongs on every crime-fiction fan’s A-list. --Bill Ott </p>

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<div><p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>When Benni finds a dead woman lying facedown in the lake, dressed in a Mother Goose costume, her investigation takes her inside the Storyteller's Guild.There she discovers that Mother Goose was telling more than fairy tales -- she was a gossip columnist who aired the kind of secrets that destroy lives -- and inspire revenge...</p>
<h3>From</h3><p>Benni Harper finds a local storyteller's body in the lake in the fourth mystery of this series. Benni has recently married the handsome Latino police chief; the murder comes just before a storytelling festival she has organized. Further complications include the arrival of assorted, unmatched relatives who stay for dinner and beyond; tensions between rabid environmentalists and locals; and the emotional bumps and whorls of Benni's second marriage. The dialogue is often engaging, and the local California color more so, but the plot is full--perhaps overfull--of hot buttons. There are the storytelling and quilting references (each of Fowler's books has a quilt pattern as its title) as well as plotlines that include a homeless person, lost computer files, unbiquitous coffeehouses, spouse abuse, an unfavorable comparison to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the local library, and a reference librarian. The most fully realized characters are two minor but crucial ones: Benni's redoubtable grandmother, Dove, and her newly met stepson, Sam. Pleasant enough. <em>GraceAnne DeCandido</em></p><h3>From Kirkus Reviews</h3><p>A fourth appearance for Benni Harper (Kansas Troubles, 1996, etc.), curator of the Folk Art Museum in San Celina, California- -recently married to the town's Chief of Police Gabe Ortiz--who's now deep in preparations for the museum's first storytelling festival, to be combined with a show of handmade quilts. It's Benni's misfortune to discover the murdered body of Nora Cooper, a storyteller at the local library. Nora's brother Nick is head reference librarian there, under director Jillian Sinclair, a niece of the library's chief benefactor, Constance Sinclair. Nora, meanwhile, was involved in a bitter divorce settlement with soon- to-be-ex-husband Roy, who lives with girlfriend Grace Winter, a stableowner. They're Gabe's prime suspects until it's revealed that Nora was the author of the Tattler, an unsigned scandal-mongering column in the town's newspaper. It seems both library and museum staffs are chock-full of people with nasty secrets Nora was busy unearthing. Gabe works hard to restrain Benni's rampant investigating instincts--with good reason, as it turns out in the out-of-left-field, unsatisfying denouement. Much time is spent on Gabe and Benni's cluttered domestic life as they play reluctant hosts to Gabe's troubled son Sam, Benni's beloved but trying grandmother Dove and flighty cousin Rita--a setup as overpopulated, artificial, and unconvincing as the murder mystery. Quilters and storytelling enthusiasts may find some joy here; others will find this one heavy on chitchat but low on substance. -- <em>Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.</em></p>

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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Ex-cop Phil Broker, hero of Logan's previous three thrillers (The Big Law, etc.), takes a break from managing his small Minnesota resort in this latest outing and fills in for his uncle as a wilderness guide in the northernmost reaches of the state. It's hardly a pleasure trip: Broker's soldier wife, Nina, has just split with their child, and one of Broker's three clients, action writer Hank Sommer, is constantly fighting with his wife, Jolene, by cell phone while Dr. Allen Falken and lawyer Milt Bane look on. Caught by a sudden blizzard as they are kayaking, Broker nearly drowns until Sommer fights their kayak across the lake, but ruptures his colon in the effort. At a minimal hospital with no surgeon in snowbound Ely, Falken operates with local nurse anesthetist Amy Skoda, but Sommer goes into post-op coma and Skoda gets the blame. Then Sommer's sexy wife takes Sommer home early, and the kinky death of a CPA, Cliff Stovall, hits the news. Pondering Sommer's last words "tell Cliff to move the money" Broker teams up with Skoda to visit Sommer and Jolene, but Skoda gets info that puts their lives in danger. Lured back to Ely and tricked by experts, Broker and Skoda are put out of action, and the scene is set for a shattering surprise ending. Logan parlays the plot elements with the icy finesse of James M. Cain and draws characters so real you can feel the body heat steaming off the page. Once again, he proves himself an awesome storyteller with a unique voice and a flawless sense of place and mood. Major ad/promo; 6-city author tour; Harper Audio. <br />Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Continuing his winning streak, Logan (The Big Law) brings back recurring character Phil Broker, now as a wilderness guide rather than an undercover police officer. Broker leads three minimally equipped men deep into the Minnesota woods to hunt moose. Before they can bag a beast, however, a massive storm destroys most of their supplies and critically injures one of the men. As the troupe's guide, it falls to Phil to get to civilization and bring back a rescue team before the man dies. The rescue and subsequent events connect their four lives in unexpected ways. Readers will delights in the first-rate characterization and compelling plot filled with unexpected twists. Recommended for popular fiction collections. Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. <br />Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>In her debut novel, the terrific thriller <em>Spin State</em>, Chris Moriarty melds cutting-edge science with post-cyberpunk fiction and neo-noir suspense to create a complex, believable future inhabited by one of the most intriguing characters in modern science fiction.</p><p>Major Catherine Li is a veteran United Nations Peacekeeper in a future of world-nations. Humanity has spread across interstellar space by "jumping": teleportation enabled by quantum physics and a bizarre crystal found only on Compson's World. The jumps destroy memory, so jumpers back up their memories on computer. Despite this precaution, frequent jumpers still lose some memories, a fact that poses a far greater problem for Catherine Li than it does for other Peacekeepers. For Li has a dangerous, potentially deadly secret: she's an illegal clone.</p><p>When a UN mission goes awry, Li finds herself shipped on solo duty to Compson's World--her home world, to which she'd vowed never to return. Her mission initially seems simple: to determine if the death of brilliant physicist Hannah Sharifi was a crystal-mining accident or cold-blooded murder. Like Li, Sharifi is a clone--in fact, she's Li's genetic twin. Li swiftly finds herself enmeshed in the intertangled politics of the UN, the multiplanetary corporations, the miners, and the human-created Artificial Intelligences, who have enigmatic agendas of their own. <em>--Cynthia Ward</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Despite incorporating nearly every well-worn SF theme, Moriarty still manages fresh insights into humanity-and posthumanity-in this highly atmospheric debut, a hefty far-future exploration of AI, human cloning, class conflict and plain old-fashioned murder. Major Catherine Li and her fellow UN Peacekeepers battle hive-minded Syndicate genetic constructs for domination of planets settled through FTL (faster than light) migrations enabled by mysterious crystals, quantum-level anomalies of unimagined substance mined only on Compson's World. Resembling the Victorian British empire, the UN's vast interstellar commercial empire runs on the blood and sweat of a few thousand pitifully exploited miners like Li's father, who died so she could remake herself and escape the miners' fate. Now wired into "streamspace" with an AI lover who interacts with her through both male and female hosts, Li is tapped to investigate the murder of physicist Hannah Sharifi, her cloned twin who hoped to share the crystals' power. Based on the short, dangerous life of miners as well as the heady scientific stuff of quantum physics, the book can be heavy slogging for the uninitiated. Moriarty effectively postulates the Faustian price of enhancing humanity with silicon, of playing God through genetic manipulation. Beneath this complex tale ominously simmers Orwell's question: If all animals are to be equal, what can prevent some from making themselves more equal than the others?<br />Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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SUMMARY:
On the Trail of the Space Pirates is the third in a series first published in the 1950's and was the inspiration for many science fiction movies and television shows of the period. Filled with action, intrigue and good old fashioned values, The Tom Corbett Space Cadet Adventures still hold the page turning power they did when they were originally published.In this adventure, pirates have cracked the security of the Solar Alliance and war has broken out in space. Tom, Roger and Astro are trapped tight in the center of all the action when Tom goes undercover on the pirate leader's spaceship. In their most dangerous and action-packed adventure, yet, the cadets must save the Solar Alliance and themselves. Remember when rockets were shaped like javelins with fins and being a "space cadet" was a good thing?


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<div><div><h3 class="productDescriptionSource">Product Description</h3>
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  Chairs. Neat people. Ugliness. War. Over six decades of intrepid 
reporting and elegant essays, Andy Rooney has proven a shrewd cultural 
analyst—unafraid to question the sometimes ridiculous, often surprising 
facts of our lives. Rooney’s great gift is telling it straight, without a
 hint of sugar coating, but with more than a grain of truth and humor. 
His take on America? “It’s just amazing how long this country has been 
going to hell without ever having got there.” On food? “There’s more 
dependable mediocrity than there used to be.”
  
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      <h3 class="productDescriptionSource">About the Author</h3>
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  <div>Known to millions for his regular commentary on the television news magazine <i>60 Minutes</i>, and his syndicated newspaper column, <b>Andrew A. Rooney</b> is the author of numerous bestselling books. He has published five previous books with PublicAffairs: <i>My War</i>, <i>Sincerely, Andy Rooney</i>, <i>Common Nonsense</i>, <i>Years of Minutes</i>, and <i>Out of My Mind</i>. He lives in New York.</div></div></div>
<h3>Review</h3><p><strong><em>Kirkus Reviews</em></strong><br>“Rooney has solid credentials as an old-fashioned liberal of an almost extinct type, one who dislikes hubbub and loudmouths but dislikes injustice even more.”</p><h3>Review</h3><p><strong><em>Kirkus Reviews</em></strong><br>“Rooney has solid credentials as an old-fashioned liberal of an almost extinct type, one who dislikes hubbub and loudmouths but dislikes injustice even more.”</p>

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<div><meta charset="utf-8"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; "><h3 class="productDescriptionSource" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 1.23em; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 0.75em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.375em; margin-left: -15px; clear: both; ">Product Description</h3><div class="productDescriptionWrapper" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">A brand-new translation of the world's greatest satirist. With a signature style that is at once bawdy and delicate, as well as a fearless penchant for lampooning the rich and powerful, Aristophanes remains arguably the finest satirist of all time. Collected here are all 11 of his surviving plays-newly translated by the distinguished poet and translator Paul Roche.<div class="emptyClear" style="clear: both; height: 0px; font-size: 0px; "></div></div><div><br></div></span></div>


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<h3>From</h3><p>If there is an explanation for the political killing perpetrated in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, historian Snyder roots it in agriculture. Stalin wanted to collectivize farmers; Hitler wanted to eliminate them so Germans could colonize the land. The dictators wielded frightening power to advance such fantasies toward reality, and the despots toted up about 14 million corpses between them, so stupefying a figure that Snyder sets himself three goals here: to break down the number into the various actions of murder that comprise it, from liquidation of the kulaks to the final solution; to restore humanity to the victims via surviving testimony to their fates; and to deny Hitler and Stalin any historical justification for their policies, which at the time had legions of supporters and have some even today. Such scope may render Snyder’s project too imposing to casual readers, but it would engage those exposed to the period’s chronology and major interpretive issues, such as the extent to which the Nazi and Soviet systems may be compared. Solid and judicious scholarship for large WWII collections. --Gilbert Taylor </p><h3>Review</h3><p><strong>Tony Judt</strong><br />“For over a decade in the middle of twentieth century, the lands between Russia and Germany were the killing fields of Europe. Tens of millions of civilians from Poland to Ukraine, Lithuania to Belarus were starved, beaten, shot and gassed to death by the authorities and armies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We think we know this story and we assign it shorthand labels: Auschwitz, the Gulag. But neither the concentration camps (which were mostly not death camps) nor the Soviet network of labor camps in Siberia (from which many survived) were representative of the worst crimes committed in these years. Jews were without question the supreme victim (and in the Nazi case, the dominant target); but there were many other victims with whom western readers are far less familiar. Without a better grasp of the scale and breadth of the suffering experienced in these lands, we cannot hope to appreciate the true impact of the twentieth century.  </p><p>“In his path-breaking and often courageous study of Europe’s ‘bloodlands,’ Timothy Snyder shows how very much more complicated the story was. His account of the methods and motives of murderous regimes, both at home and in foreign war, will radically revise our appreciation of the implications of mass extermination in the recent past. <em>Bloodlands</em> – impeccably researched and appropriately sensitive to its volatile material – is the most important book to appear on this subject for decades and will surely become the reference in its field.”</p><p><strong>Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</strong></p><p>“Historians of Nazi Germany have analyzed Hitler’s war of destruction in the East, Final Solution, and vast racial revolution and colonization project outlined in the <em>Generalplan Ost</em>.  Historians of the Soviet Union have analyzed Stalin’s collectivization, Great Terror, Gulag archipelago, deportation and exile of mistrusted minorities, and rapid sovietization of newly-annexed territories on the western border.  In both cases the focus has been more often on the politics and decision-making of the dictatorships than on the fate of their victims.  The stunning contribution of Tim Snyder’s book is to present a synthetic account by an East European historian in which the focus is on the geographic zone where the lethal policies of Hitler and Stalin interacted, overlapped, and mutually escalated one another.  As Snyder vividly demonstrates, their combined impact on the people living in the ‘bloodlands’ was quite simply the greatest man-made demographic catastrophe and human tragedy in European history.”</p><p><em></em>Professor Norman Davies, F.B.A., author of _Europe: A History<br />_<em></em>“Nearly seventy years after VE-Day, World War Two continues to be perceived through a narrow Western perspective, and many basic problems about the war of 1939-45 remain unresolved. In <em>Bloodlands</em> – which refers to the huge belt of territory between Germany and Russia – Timothy Snyder examines the little known tract of the European continent that was scourged by Stalin as well as Hitler, and reaches some disturbing conclusions.  Combining formidable linguistic and detective skills with a fine sense of impartiality, he tackles vital questions which have deterred less courageous historians: Where and when were the largest casualties inflicted?   Who were the perpetrators, and which ethnic and national groups were victimized? How can one calculate and verify the numbers?  This is a book which will force its readers to rethink history.”  </p><p><strong>Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, and author of <em>The File</em></strong></p><p>“Timothy Snyder has written a nuanced, original and penetrating analysis of Europe’s twentieth century killing fields between Russia and Germany, drawing on many little-known sources. History of a high order, <em>Bloodlands</em> may also point us towards lessons for our own time.”</p><p><strong><em>Kirkus</em></strong><strong>, Starred Review</strong></p><p> “A chillingly systematic study of the mass murder mutually perpetrated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany…. A significant work of staggering figures and scholarship.”</p><p><strong><em>Booklist</em></strong></p><p>“Solid and judicious scholarship.”</p><p><strong><em>The Sunday Times</em> (London)</strong><br />“This is a superb work of scholarship, full of revealing detail, cleverly compiled from a number of previously little-known sources, and in places beautifully written…. He searched hidden archives in five countries and judiciously mined unknown memoirs and diaries. . . . Snyder does justice to the horror of his subject through the power of his storytelling.”</p><p>_<em></em>Guardian<strong>_</strong> (London)<br /><em></em>“[_Bloodlands_] modifies our view of this appalling period. . . . Snyder insists that the colossal atrocities in his ‘bloodlands’ have to be set inside a single historical frame. To look at them separately – for instance, to see Hitler’s crimes as ‘so great as to stand outside history’, or Stalin’s as a monstrous device to achieve modernisation – is to let the two dictators ‘define their own works for us’. . . .This book’s unforgettable account of the Ukraine famine shows conclusively that Stalin knew what was happening in the countryside and chose to let it run its course. . . . The figures are so huge and so awful that grief could grow numb. But Snyder, who is a noble writer as well as a great researcher, knows that. He asks us not to think in those round numbers.”</p><p>_<strong> The Economist</strong>_<br />“[G]ripping and comprehensive…. Mr. Snyder’s book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe’s modern history…. Even those who pride themselves on knowing their history will find themselves repeatedly brought up short by his insights, contrasts and comparisons…. Mr. Snyder’s scrupulous and nuanced book steers clear of the sterile, sloganising exchanges about whether Stalin was as bad as Hitler, or whether Soviet mass murder in Ukraine or elsewhere is a moral equivalent of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. What it does do, admirably, is to explain and record. Both totalitarian empires turned human beings into statistics, and their deaths into a necessary step towards a better future. Mr. Snyder’s book explains, with sympathy, fairness and insight, how that happened, and to whom.”<br /><em></em><br />Anne Applebaum, <em></em>_<strong>New York Review of Books</strong>_<br />“[A] brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century…. Snyder’s original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.”<br />_<em></em><br />The Wall Street Journal<em></em>_<br />“The story of World War II, like that of most wars, usually gets told by the victors. Diplomatic and military accounts are set largely in the West and star the morally upright Allies—the U.S., Britain and Soviet Union—in battles against fascism. The Holocaust gets its own separate history, as a case apart in its genocidal intent and human tragedy. Timothy <em>Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin</em> forces a dramatic shift in these perceptions…. Among his other goals in Bloodlands, Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context—to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy. Yet far from minimizing Jewish suffering, Bloodlands gives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine.”</p><p><strong><em>The Economist</em></strong>_<br />_“[G]ripping and comprehensive…. Mr. Snyder’s book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe’s modern history…. Even those who pride themselves on knowing their history will find themselves repeatedly brought up short by his insights, contrasts and comparisons…. Mr. Snyder’s scrupulous and nuanced book steers clear of the sterile, sloganising exchanges about whether Stalin was as bad as Hitler, or whether Soviet mass murder in Ukraine or elsewhere is a moral equivalent of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. What it does do, admirably, is to explain and record. Both totalitarian empires turned human beings into statistics, and their deaths into a necessary step towards a better future. Mr. Snyder’s book explains, with sympathy, fairness and insight, how that happened, and to whom.”</p><p><strong>Anne Applebaum, _New York__ Review of Books_</strong>_<br />_“[A] brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century…. Snyder’s original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famin...</p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p><em>Starred Review.</em> In a masterful account, Oxford don Elliott explores the simultaneous development of Spanish and English colonies in the so-called New World. Though colonists tried to recreate traditional institutions on American soil, there were inevitable differences between colonial life and life in the mother countries: familial roles, for example, were reconfigured across the ocean. In addition to differing from Europe, Spanish and British settlements differed from one another, says Elliott. Whereas Spain determined to prevent Jews and Moors from entering its territories, Britain's grudging acceptance of religious diversity was evidenced in the Crown's allowing, and in some cases encouraging, persecuted minorities to join colonial ventures. The English colonies' fractious Protestantism made Spain's Catholic colonies look homogeneous by contrast. Yet the "pigmentocratic" social order of Spanish colonies proved to be exceedingly complex. English colonies, with their adoption of racial slavery, came to be organized around the deceptively simple categories of black and white, while Spanish America was home to varied ethnic groups that readily produced "mixed-blood" offspring. Ultimately, British colonies would privilege innovation and entrepreneurship, while Spanish-speaking society held on more firmly to "the old hierarchies." Elliott's synthesis represents some of the finest fruits of the study of the Atlantic world. Illus., maps._ (May)_ <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Richly illustrated and based on a thorough an (Carla Rahn Phillips <em>Eighteenth-Century Studies</em> )</p>

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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>Combining breathtaking, evocative narrative with razor-sharp historical analysis, Bayly and Harper provide a dramatic account of independent Asia's baptism of fire in the turbulent aftermath of the Second World War. They capture in vivid detail the euphoria and trauma that swept the crescent stretching from Calcutta to Singapore as Britain's Asian empire unraveled. This brilliant book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the history of Britain, Asia and empire.<br>--Sugata Bose, author of <em>A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire</em> (20070701)  </p><p>Like their earlier collaborative volume, <em>Forgotten Armies</em>, Bayly and Harper's new book presents a fascinating story of Britain's Asian empire in transition. Europeans, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Burmese, Malays, Indonesians, and many others interacted as they sought to define anew the nature of empire, territory, and citizenship. There is no better way to understand the region's survival and emergence as a center of economic development and prosperity than to revisit the immediate postwar years under the expert guidance provided by Bayly and Harper. <br>--Akira Iriye, Professor of History Emeritus, Harvard University (20070813)  </p><p><em>Forgotten Wars</em> is an insightful and original look at the fate of Britain's Asian Empire in the wake of World War II. Engaging and provocative, the masterful discussion of the Malayan Emergency will be of interest to all concerned with the dilemmas presented by insurgencies in our contemporary world.<br>--Ronald Spector, author of <em>In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Struggle for a Postwar Asia</em> (20070809)  </p><p>Historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper chronicle the ensuing struggles for Britain's Southeast Asian colonies in <em>Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia</em>, the sequel to their much-praised history of Britain's Asian empire during World War II, <em>Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945</em>. Primarily a diplomatic and political history rather than a military history, the new book focuses on the causes of armed conflict. After Japan's capitulation, Messrs. Bayly and Harper contend, Southeast Asia remained in a state of war for the same reasons it had entered into such a state: poverty, imperialism, and ethnic, religious, and ideological conflict. The authors have mined a very large number of sources. Most of their new historical unearthing can be found in the intricacies of Southeast Asian politics, which they describe in great detail and with careful nuance. Those deeply interested in the politics of Burma or Malaysia or other Southeast Asian countries will find much to delight them here.<br>--Mark Moyar (_New York Sun_ 20070901)  </p><p>Two years after their brilliant and vivid <em>Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-45</em>, the Cambridge historians Bayly and Harper produce a sequel that examines Britain's conflicts in Southeast Asia in the four years after the Second World War. While adroitly analyzing Britain's hard-fought battle against insurrectionary forces in Malaya, the authors explore lesser-known episodes: Bengalese and Burmese skirmishes seldom highlighted in accounts of the Raj's end, and the British interregnums between the ends of the Japanese occupations of Indonesia and Vietnam and the restorations of the respective former colonial administrations. (_The Atlantic_ 20080401)  </p><p>Authoritative.<br>--Pankaj Mishra (_New Yorker_ )  </p><p>[A] compelling book...An extraordinary cast of characters populate <em>Forgotten Wars</em>...The authors write that "the end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely," but when examined so ably it is certainly fascinating.<br>--Philip Delves Broughton (_Wall Street Journal_ )  </p><p>The authors are particularly good in their analysis of the problems of state building, on the one hand, and nation building, on the other. (_Foreign Affairs_ )  </p><p><em>Forgotten Wars</em> movingly brings out the travails of ordinary people who got caught up within a vicious cycle of political turmoil, economic deprivation, and violence. This is a “must read” for those interested in histories of British imperialism and decolonization in Asia and those who would like an introduction to the comparative regional histories of nation-states in Southeast Asia after 1945.<br>--Haimanti Roy (_Journal of British Studies_ )  </p><p>This book is neither an old-fashioned “top down” history of imperial politics in the region, nor a regional “bottom up” account of nationalist resistance to European rule. Rather, it shows how British illusions about the nature of Britain’s power in Southeast Asia collided with Asian national movements. This book addresses an important phase of that tragic history, for which, as the authors show, Britain bore considerable responsibility. <br>--A. Martin Wainwright (_American Historical Review_ ) </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>In September 1945, after the fall of the atomic bomb--and with it, the Japanese empire--Asia was dominated by the British. Governing a vast crescent of land that stretched from India through Burma and down to Singapore, and with troops occupying the French and Dutch colonies in southern Vietnam and Indonesia, Britain's imperial might had never seemed stronger. </p><p>Yet within a few violent years, British power in the region would crumble, and myriad independent nations would struggle into existence. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper show how World War II never really ended in these ravaged Asian lands but instead continued in bloody civil wars, anti-colonial insurrections, and inter-communal massacres. These years became the most formative in modern Asian history, as Western imperialism vied with nascent nationalist and communist revolutionaries for political control. </p><p><em>Forgotten Wars</em>, a sequel to the authors' acclaimed <em>Forgotten Armies</em>, is a panoramic account of the bitter wars of the end of empire, seen not only through the eyes of the fighters, but also through the personal stories of ordinary people: the poor and bewildered caught up in India's Hindu-Muslim massacres; the peasant farmers ravaged by warfare between British forces and revolutionaries in Malaya; the Burmese minorities devastated by separatist revolt. Throughout, we are given a stunning portrait of societies poised between the hope of independence and the fear of strife. <em>Forgotten Wars</em> vividly brings to life the inescapable conflicts and manifold dramas that shaped today's Asia. </p><p>(20070425) </p>

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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>Collective title of five comic novels by Francois Rabelais, published between 1532 and 1564. The novels present the comic and satiric story of the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The first two novels were published under the anagrammatic pseudonym Alcofribas (Alcofrybas) Nasier. The first book, commonly called Pantagruel (1532), deals with some of the fantastic incidents of the early years of Pantagruel. While at the University of Paris he receives a letter from his father that is still considered an essential exposition of French Renaissance ideals. In Paris Pantagruel also meets the cunning rogue Panurge, who becomes his companion throughout the series. In Gargantua (1534), old-fashioned scholastic pedagogy is ridiculed and contrasted with the humanist ideal of King Francis I, whose efforts to reform the French church Rabelais supported. Le Tiers Livre (1546; "The Third Book") is Rabelais's most profound and erudite work. In it Pantagruel has become a sage; Panurge is self-absorbed and bedeviled, wondering if he should marry. He consults various prognosticators, allowing Rabelais to hold forth on sex, love, and marriage, and to satirize fortune tellers, judges, and poets. Panurge persuades Pantagruel and friends to join him on a voyage to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle in Cathay for an answer. This they do in Le Quart Livre (1552; "The Fourth Book"), which reflects the era's interest in exploration; the Pantagruelians encounter a series of islands that present opportunities for the author to satirize the religious and political forces wreaking havoc on 16th-century Christendom. In a fifth book, Le Cinquieme Livre (1564; of doubtful authenticity), the band arrives at the temple of the Holy Bottle, where the oracle answers Panurge with a single word: "Drink!" -- __</p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>An elaborate parody written in the 16th century, "Gargantua and Pantagruel" is a comic blend of energetic realism and carnival fantasy. The two main characters are giants, a father and his son, who have numerous adventures. Many different types of people are satirized during their chivalric exploits, from lawyers to theologians, generals to monarchs, with humor that is often grotesque or obscene. Intertwined with this crude comedy, however, is the wisdom of Renaissance learning, which exposes countless examples of human foolishness. Divided into two volumes, one describes a sullied giant who grows into a grand knight and prince, and the other portrays his erudite son who himself becomes a Renaissance Socrates. Rabelais' work is full of freedom and laughter, as well as a certain understanding that will give readers a renewed worldview. </p>

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<div><h3>Product Description</h3><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 were killed in the civil wars than in the 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 Braddick's remarkable book gives the reader a vivid and enduring sense both of 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 outcomes, and Braddick 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 to understand once more the events that have so fundamentally marked this country and which still resonate centuries after their bloody ending. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Michael Braddick is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558--1700 and State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1500--1700. </p>

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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>The story of Prussia is one that has been told many times, but seldom as intelligently, elegantly and interestingly as it is here. Christopher Clark has written a monumental history of a state that started from small beginnings as the Mark of Brandenburg, grew in size, violence and pretensions, and ended up being destroyed forever in 1947, when the victorious Allies decided they had had enough of this troublesome phenomenon...The bulk of a fascinating text, littered with intriguing detail and wry observation, focuses on this transformation in the 200 years from the bloody Thirty Years War in the 17th century (which cost Prussia half its population) to the creation by the Prussian nobleman Otto von Bismarck of a German Empire in 1871...Clark has written a masterly synthesis of [the] many disparate strands in a long and ultimately forlorn history. (Richard Overy <em>Daily Telegraph</em> 20060806)  </p><p><em>Iron Kingdom</em>, is a triumph of scholarship and imagination. This is a big book in every sense--at almost 800 pages, it's not one to slip in your briefcase for the train--but it zips along in a manner that belies its weight. In part this is because Clark writes so elegantly. This is history in its "grand sweep," but his vivid sketches of characters, places and events lighten the narrative. Yet for all its entertainment value, <em>Iron Kingdom</em> is at heart an unflinching engagement with one of Europe's most complex and far-reaching political and cultural entities, spanning four centuries of history and, he suggests at the end, even beyond. (Richard Aldous <em>Irish Times</em> 20060818)  </p><p>Clark's book, a survey of Prussian history from 1600 to 1947, is well-written, even sometimes sprightly, although it is hard to make easy reading of matters such as Pietism or the administrative reforms of the Baron Stein. <em>Iron Kingdom</em>'s triumph lies in a narrative structure that is even more impressive than the mass of detail that forms it; and one feels secure in the hands not only of a scholar but of a humane and fair interpreter of history. (Max Egremont <em>The Spectator</em> 20060903)  </p><p>To account for the rise and tumultuous extinction of Prussia is to explain how contemporary Europe came to assume its current form. It is a vast, Zeppelin-sized historical challenge; but it is also one to which Christopher Clark rises triumphantly, piloting his enormous subject through the best part of four centuries, traversing en route most of the continent of Europe, and carrying the reader with him on a bracing and exhilarating ride...For sheer range and intellectual horsepower, this book ranks as the best history of Prussia currently available in any language. However, more than that (and here it beats its German rivals hands-down), it is written with a literary finesse and narrative elan that establish its author as one of the finest writers of history at work in Britain today. It is a virtuoso performance. (John Adamson <em>Sunday Times</em> 20060927)  </p><p>It is only by contrary example that this book may remind us how miserable some hastily written products of the recent "history boom" have been. Clark is not one to swagger over the dead, secure in the knowledge that they cannot answer back. Instead, this is a well-informed and fair-minded historical investigation, written by a man who is plainly fascinated by the changing circumstances under which lives are lived and decisions made. One of the pleasures of this book is to watch Clark weighing the undeniable otherness of the past and resisting any tendency to convert it into a costume drama. (Patrick Wright <em>The Guardian</em> 20060927)  </p><p>You couldn't have the triumph and the tragedy of Prussia better told. Christopher Clark has a voracious appetite for detail and a tart turn of phrase. His study of Prussia, from beginning to end, vividly paints one of the big pictures of European history. (Peter Preston <em>The Observer</em> 20061209)  </p><p><em>Iron Kingdom</em> is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be. The research is scholarly but never obtrusive, the prose sprightly but never flippant, the judgements bold but always sound...The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language. (Daniel Johnson <em>Sunday Telegraph</em> 20061206)  </p><p>Many states have been conquered, partitioned, occupied, "ended" and even destroyed. Prussia is unique in that it was formally abolished by decree of the British, American, French and Soviet victors in February 1947, after it ceased to exist in any meaningful sense...Christopher Clark begins <em>Iron Kingdom</em>, his history of "the rise and downfall of Prussia," with this famous decree, but his remarkable book is not another exorcism, nor an uncritical celebration. He provides a sophisticated yet accessible account of how a middling German dynasty manoeuvred its way into the European pentarchy of powers. (Brendan Simms <em>The Independent</em> 20070927)  </p><p>This book ranks as the best history of Prussia currently available in any language... It is a virtuoso performance. (John Adamson <em>Sunday Times</em> 20070801)  </p><p><em>Iron Kingdom</em>, Christopher Clark's stately, authoritative history of Prussia from its humble beginnings to its ignominious end, presents a much more complicated and compelling picture of the German state, which is too often reduced to a caricature of spiked helmets and polished boots. Prussia and its army were inseparable, but Prussia was also renowned for its efficient, incorruptible civil service; its innovative system of social services; its religious tolerance; and its unrivaled education system, a model for the rest of Germany and the world. This too was Prussia--a tormented kingdom that, like a tragic hero, was brought down by the very qualities that raised it up. Mr. Clark, a senior lecturer in modern European history at Cambridge University, does an exemplary job. A lively writer, he organizes masses of material in orderly fashion, clearly establishing his main themes and pausing at crucial junctures to recapitulate and reconsider. Prussia, a self-invented artifact right down to its name, demands the kind of careful demythologizing that it receives from Mr. Clark, who gently but insistently exposes the flaws in most of the received wisdom about his subject. A result is an illuminating, profoundly satisfying work of history, brightened by vivid character sketches of the principals in his drama. (William Grimes <em>New York Times</em> 20080312)  </p><p>This book can...be read for sheer pleasure...It is the pleasure of discovery that Christopher Clark offers in this account of the rise and fall of Prussia...Prussia was much more than its wars, but without its wars it would not have been Prussia, and they and their protagonists (Mr. Clark's Bismarck is priceless), origins, conduct, and consequences occupy a large part of this excellent book, which scholars of Germany and Prussia will want to ponder very carefully, and which many an unencumbered reader will simply enjoy. (Edward N. Luttwak <em>New York Sun</em> )  </p><p>A massively impressive history of Prussia that surely takes its place as the definitive history of this much-maligned state. Elegant, entertaining, nicely illustrated and full of arresting characters, this is a terrific book. (Dominic Sandbrook <em>Daily Telegraph</em> )  </p><p>From the military and agricultural innovations of Frederick the Great to nineteenth-century high academic politics to Bismarck's social-security system, this magisterial and remarkably well-written history of Prussia traces back to the eighteenth century the region's surprisingly tolerant and intellectually rich culture. Clark, a Cambridge historian, suggests that the world is poorer for Prussia's absence. (Benjamin Healy <em>The Atlantic</em> )  </p><p>[An] enthralling, shrewd, and sparkling narrative...Clark's immensely learned, judicious, and entertaining book provides a definitive general narrative of its subject for our times...Clark's achievement is substantial. (R. J. W. Evans <em>New York Review of Books</em> )  </p><p>This beautifully written and brilliantly argued longer study will reward scholars, students, and educated laypeople who invest the time to read it...[A] riveting narrative. (C. Ingrao <em>Choice</em> )  </p><p>[A] valuable book...[Clark] shows how complicated the history of Prussia really was, and how exciting were the contrasts in its history between religious tolerance and intolerance, enlightenment and obscurantism, centralized power and regional particularism, the rule of law and ruthless authoritarianism...Prussia and its army were full of contradictions, and Clark analyzes them astutely in his book, which is certainly the best recent history of Prussia...[A] masterpiece in which charming anecdotes and serious intellectual analyses mix comfortably with political and military history and descriptions of cultural and social phenomena...Clark's book seldom becomes dull, owing to the elegance of its style and the colorfulness of some of its powerful characters. (Istvan Deak <em>New Republic</em> ) </p><h3>Review</h3><p>Chris Clark's new history of Prussia trumps all existing accounts. It commands four centuries of complicated history with extraordinary assurance. Its clear and confident argumentation, illuminating concreteness of detail, and sheer richness of texture make it the ideal general history. (Geoff Eley, author of <em>A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society</em> 20060826) </p>

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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>From its first publication in 1981, Lanark was hailed as a masterpiece and it has come to be widely regarded as the most remarkable and influential Scottish novel of the second half of the twentieth century. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide-ranging concerns, its playful narrative conveys at its core a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying. With its echoes of Dante, Blake, Joyce, Kafka, and Lewis Carroll, Lanark has been published all over the world and to unanimous acclaim. This edition marks the novel's return to its original publisher and features a superb new introduction by the award-winning novelist Janice Galloway, and the author's Tailpiece, a fascinating addendum to the novel. "It was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it." -- Anthony Burgess "Alasdair Gray is one of the most important living writers in English." -- Stephen Bernstein, The New York Times Book Review "Remarkable ... Lanark is a work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches." -- William Boyd, The Times Literary Supplement (London) "Undoubtedly the best work of fiction written by a Scottish author for decades." -- Time Out (London) "A quite extraordinary achievement, the most remarkable thing in Scottish fiction for a very long time." -- The Scotsman </p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of the most enormous criminal enterprises in history, the extermination of Europe's Jews?  Giving considerable emphasis to a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander restores the voices of Jews who, after the 1933 Nazi accession to power, were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality. We hear from the persecutors themselves: the leaders of the Nazi party, the members of the Protestant and Catholic hierarchies, the university elites, and the heads of the business community. Most telling of all, perhaps, are the testimonies of ordinary German citizens, who in the main acquiesced to increasing waves of dismissals, segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, expulsion, and violence.</p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>With The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer completes his major historical work on Nazi Germany and the Jews. The book describes and interprets the persecution and murder of the Jews throughout occupied Europe. The enactment of German extermination policies and measures depended on the cooperation of local authorities, the assistance of police forces, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. This implementation depended as well on the victims’ readiness to submit to orders, often with the hope of attenuating them or of surviving long enough to escape the German vise.   This multifaceted study—at all levels and in different places—enhances the perception of the magnitude, complexity, and interrelatedness of the many components of this history. Based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices—mainly from diaries, letters, and memoirs—Saul Friedländer avoids domesticating the memory of these unprecedented and horrific events. The convergence of these various aspects gives a unique quality to The Years of Extermination. In this work, the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.</p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The recording industry's panic over illegal downloads is nothing new; a century ago, London publishers faced a similar crisis when pirate editions of sheet music were widely available at significantly less cost. Similarly, the debate over pharmaceutical patents echoes an 18th-century dispute over the origins of Epsom salt. These are just two of the historical examples that Johns (_The Nature of the Book_) draws upon as he traces the tensions between authorized and unauthorized producers and distributors of books, music, and other intellectual property in British and American culture from the 17th century to the present. Johns's history is liveliest when it is rooted in the personal—the 19th-century renegade bibliographer Samuel Egerton Brydges, for example, or the jazz and opera lovers who created a thriving network of bootleg recordings in the 1950s—but the shifting theoretical arguments about copyright and authorial property are presented in a cogent and accessible manner. Johns's research stands as an important reminder that today's intellectual property crises are not unprecedented, and offers a survey of potential approaches to a solution. 40 b&amp;w illus. <em>(Feb.) </em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"In his invaluable book <em>Piracy</em>, Adrian Johns argues that the tendency of intellectual property battles to undermine privacy is not new. On the contrary, Johns . . . argues that ever since the medieval and Enlightenment eras, corporations have tried to defend their economic interests by searching for intellectual piracy in the private sphere of people''s homes. He says that all of our current debates about intellectual piracy—from Google''s efforts to create a universal digital library to the fight over how vigorous patents should be—have antecedents in the copyright wars of earlier eras."—Jeffrey Rosen, <em>Washington Post</em>  </p><p>(Jeffrey Rosen <em>Washington Post</em> )  </p><p>“It’s easy to assume, amid all the brouhaha about intellectual property, illegal downloading, and the internet in general, that the question of piracy was born with the web browser. But as long as there have been ideas, people have been accused of stealing them. In this detail-packed biography of fakery, science historian Adrian Johns describes one of the earliest attempts to protect authors’ rights—a vellum-bound book registry in the Stationer’s Hall in 17th century London—and examines everything from the Victorian crusade against the patent, to the radio pirates of the 1920s, to the telephone phreakers of the 1970s and the computer hackers of today. Piracy is not new, he concludes, but we are due for a revolution in intellectual property, and science may be its ideal breeding ground.”—_Seed_  </p><p>(_Seed_ )  </p><p>“While the rise of the Internet has given it new dimensions, the concept of intellectual piracy has existed for centuries, and the disputes of previous eras have much in common with those of our own time. In a new book, _Piracy, <em>Adrian Johns details the long history of the term and its battles, arguing that those who would shape the future of intellectual property should first understand its past.”—</em>Inside Higher Education_  </p><p>(_Inside Higher Education_ )  </p><p>“Johns makes a bold claim: disputes over intellectual piracy have touched on so many crucial issues of creativity and commerce, identity and invention, science and society, that tracing them amounts to ‘a history of modernity from askance.’ . . . More generally, <em>Piracy</em> shows us how the very notion of intellectual property—and its sharp division into the fields of patent and copyright—was created in response to specific pressures and so could be modified dramatically or even abolished. . . . ‘We are constantly trying to shoehorn problems into an intellectual framework designed 150 years ago in a different world.’”—Matthew Reisz, <em>Times Higher Education</em>  </p><p>(_Times Higher Education_ )  </p><p>"Adrian Johns argues that piracy is a cultural force that has driven the development of intellectual-property law, politics, and practices. As copying technologies have advanced, from the invention of printing in the sixteenth century to the present, acts of piracy have shaped endeavours from scientific publishing to pharmaceuticals and software. . . . Johns suggests, counter-intuitively, that piracy can promote the development of technology. The resulting competition forces legitimate innovators to manoeuvre for advantage—by moving quickly, using technical countermeasures or banding together and promoting reputation as an indicator of quality, such as through trademarks. . . . The exclusive rights granted by intellectual-property laws are always being reshaped by public opinion, and accused pirates have lobbied against these laws for centuries."—Michael Gollin, <em>Nature</em></p><p>(Michael Gollin <em>Nature</em> ) </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Stone builds on his expertise in the long 19th century in this very successful overview of a cold war whose end, he says, was a complete surprise. Intellectually, Marxism-Leninism in parts of the West was more of a vital belief system than in the East, where it was an orthodoxy Diplomatically, for every Western success there seemed to be multiple triumphs for Communist countries or Third World proxies. Militarily, a thermonuclear stalemate framed a spectrum of defeats in unconventional wars and insurgencies. Europe was moribund; America was uncertain. Then the U.S.S.R. imploded. The Western-generated forces of individualism and creativity might have been overshadowed, says Stone, but for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who he says personified their re-emergence. The Atlantic world boomed unexpectedly while the East was gridlocked and the Third World hobbled by ideologically based overextension and overmanagement, too arteriosclerotic to withstand the stress of reform. Stone's consistently vivid text presents history as a contingent process whose results are never ideal—but neither are they permanent. Illus. <em>(June 1)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p><strong><em>The Economist</em></strong><br />“[Stone] has a terrific eye for detail, bringing to life everything from the ruins of Germany to Ronald Reagan’s White House with a wonderfully waspish turn of phrase…. He captures well the West’s weakness, as well as the seemingly powerful challenge that eastern-style socialism posed to Western freedom.”  </p><p><strong>Michael Burleigh, <em>Spectator</em></strong><br />“Sparkling....The book’s importance is to remind us that the Cold War was an active contest, whose outcome was by no means certain....Stone has produced a powerful alternative to the Left ‘liberal’ reading of Cold War history, without sounding in the least triumphalist.”  </p><p><strong><em>New Statesman</em></strong></p><p>“Stone’s eye for the telling detail gives his account of the cold war years an edge of authenticity lacking from more conventional histories…. A beguiling mix of grand narrative and autobiographical vignettes, <em>The Atlantic and its Enemies</em> is the one book that anyone who wants to understand the cold war as it developed must read…. [A] rich, exuberant and melancholy book.”  </p><p><strong><em>Wall Street Journal</em></strong></p><p>“[Norman Stone] paints on a broad canvas, showing how the Cold War unfolded…. The West is currently engaged in a new sort of war, with radical Islam.... Meanwhile, the economy of the developed world is more precarious than it was in the darkest hours of the 1970s. Mr. Stone doesn’t stop to address the contemporary crisis, but <em>The Atlantic and Its Enemies</em> is an inspiring reminder that the West has risen to meet such challenges before, helped at crucial moments by bold leaders.”  </p><p><strong><em>Library Journal</em></strong></p><p>“Stone, one of Great Britain’s most distinguished historians, now offers his own assessment of the period between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union…. [He] bring[s] decades of erudition to his analysis; moreover, he lived in Eastern Europe during part of the period under review and brings that perspective to his work as well.”  </p><p><strong>John Gray, <em>New Statesman</em> (London)</strong><br />“Stone’s eye for the telling detail gives his account of the cold war years an edge of authenticity lacking from more conventional histories…. A beguiling mix of grand narrative and autobiographical vignettes, The Atlantic and Its Enemies is the one book that anyone who wants to understand the cold war as it developed must read…. [A] rich, exuberant and melancholy book.”  </p><p><strong><em>The Times</em> (UK)</strong></p><p>“Brilliant....A forthright, brave history, full of wit and humanity, and readable to a degree that will delight all but the green-eyed.”  </p><p><strong>Geoffrey Wheatcroft, <em>Guardian</em> (London)</strong><br />“[Stone] knows central Europe better than most historians, and has no sympathy with the ‘revisionist’ claim that the west started the conflict, or that both sides were equally to blame…. All of this is told in a lively or even rollicking fashion, and the word ‘personal’ in Stone’s subtitle is an understatement; idiosyncratic or downright eccentric might be more like it. The author is one of the great academic characters of our time.”  </p><p><strong>Boyd Tonkin, <em>Independent</em> (London) (UK)</strong><br />“Wandering, opinionated, mischievous, the book is strung between two downfalls, that of the Third Reich in 1945 and the Soviet empire in 1989. Stone’s vagabond history rattles across one world-shaking scene of upheaval after another, from the Moscow-backed putsches of the late 1940s in eastern Europe via the 1960s’ feast of fools and the 1970s convulsions that led to the later triumph of Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet to the unpredicted foundering of Soviet power: Stone’s terminus, and his final vindication in the face of gormless academic fellow-travellers…. The book bristles with gleeful passages of lefty-baiting provocation….In these moods, part-Evelyn Waugh, part-Jeremy Clarkson, Stone just loves to goad the liberal left. Yet they alternate with hard-headed analyses of the financial shifts behind political façades (with a brilliant account of how Saudi oil-price manipulation helped sink the Soviet Union), virtuoso sketches of pivotal events (such as Papa Doc’s funeral) and enthralling, colourful swerves into memoir.”  </p><p><strong>Mark Mazower, <em>Financial Times</em></strong><br />“Pedantic historians are just one of Norman Stone’s targets in this swashbuckling survey of the cold war. Perhaps the most brilliant Europeanist of his generation, a man with an intimate knowledge of at least half a dozen countries, and the languages to match, he serves the reader a spicier fare than the pabulums provided by his more cautious brethren." _<strong> </strong><em>_TusconCitizen.com </em><br />“What gives this hefty 668-page book its literary legs is how the author has vividly captured the atmosphere of the time and the moral and political crises that tempered strategies on both sides of the Atlantic. <em>The Atlantic and Its Enemies</em> is full of surp  </p><p><strong> _ <em>_TusconCitizen.com</em> </strong><br />“What gives this hefty 668-page book its literary legs is how the author has vividly captured the atmosphere of the time and the moral and political crises that tempered strategies on both sides of the Atlantic. <em>The Atlantic and Its Enemies</em> is full of surprises."<em></em>  </p><p><em></em><strong> _ <em>_Bookviews.com</em> </strong><br />“Some works of history are so monumental that they are especially deserving of praise. This is the case of Norman Stone’s <em>The Atlantic and Its Enemies</em>.” </p><p><strong><em>National Review</em></strong></p><p>“Stone, the veteran British journalist and historian, has produced an original interpretative narrative that is idiosyncratic and downright odd in places…. Yet it is precisely Stone’s departures from the standard political-diplomatic themes that enable him to offer a fresh and provocative perspective on events we might have thought thoroughly familiar…. One of the beguiling charms of Stone’s narrative is the way in which his cool, understated prose bursts from the page at piquant moments, especially when describing the defects of political leaders of the 1960s and 1970s…. <em>The Atlantic and Its Enemies</em> [is] a worthy addition to the essential Cold War canon. Add it to your shelf.”</p><p><strong>Pat Shipman, Professor of Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University and author of <em>Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari</em></strong></p><p>“Nancy Marie Brown again uses her extraordinary ability to bring medieval time to life in_ The Abacus and the Cross_, in the person of the ‘Scientist Pope’ Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester III). Working from sparse records, Brown manages to tell us of the remarkable scholar, brilliant mathematician, and inveterate punster who loved both his holy orders and luxurious living. She shows us a time in which the route to God lay through the study of science and math and when intellectual developments flowed across the boundaries of religion and empire in Eurasia. This is a remarkable book that reflects on our modern times on every page.”</p><hr /><p><strong>Jeff Sypeck, author of <em>Becoming Charlemagne</em></strong></p><p>“A pleasure to read, <em>The Abacus and the Cross </em>draws readers into a world of intrigue, superstition, and scholarship. Nancy Marie Brown writes lucidly about math and science, finding important stories in the lives of medieval people who deserve to be widely remembered.”</p>


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<div><h3>From</h3><p><em>Starred Review</em> The title, taken from Gibbon’s immortal work on imperial Rome, was chosen since British imperialists consciously compared their empire to the Roman imperium. Despite the title, this is no dreary tale of imperial decay and collapse. Instead, Brendon, a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, has written a colorful and often brilliant examination of the imperial experience from the American Revolution to the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. He combines the genres of narrative history, travelogue, and biographical sketch to capture the richness, majesty, squalor, and injustice that created and maintained a vast edifice that has left an indelible imprint on the contemporary world. The narrative ranges across imperial settings in a successful effort to illustrate how both ordinary and extraordinary people lived, thrived, and often suffered under the British flag. Of course, decline and ultimate fall is part of the story. As a liberal empire based (in spirit if not always in practice) on the ideals of political liberty and even equality, it was an empire that contained the seeds of its own destruction, as citizens from America to India took those ideals to heart. The breadth, diversity, greatness, and failures of the British Empire have rarely been portrayed as well. --Jay Freeman </p><h3>Review</h3><p>“Splendid . . . Graphically narrated . . . [Brendon’s] book is history with the nasty bits left in . . . Provides a cautionary text for a new administration that will inherit autocratic allies, penal colonies, reliance on coercive power, and pervasive cynicism about America’s declared global arms.”<br>–Karl E. Meyer, _Washington Post Book World<br>_<br>“Complex . . . Lucid . . . Every page is consistently readable and stimulating.”<br>–Geoffrey Wheatcroft, _The New York Times Book Review<br>_<br>“The author is such a lively writer that I’d be hard pressed to find dull patches in this whooper of a book . . . Brendon’s narrative is wonderfully stocked with generals, politicians, rugged adventurers, consuls, eccentrics, administrators, and famous imperial hands.”<br>–Matthew Price, <em>Boston Globe</em>  </p><p>“A richly detailed, lucid account of how the British Empire grew and grew–and then, not quite inexorably, fell apart.”<br>--_Kirkus<br>_<br>"A book of enormous range and complexity and leavened with a splendid sense of wit and irony. It takes courage to emulate the great Gibbon, but Brendon succeeds magnificently. And while there may be many books on the British Empire, this is undoubtedly the most entertaining and the best."<br>--Dominic Sandbrook, _The Evening Standard<br>_<br>"A masterpiece of a historical narrative. No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon's research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humor of his prose. Our imperial story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write. Now it has one."<br>--Saul David, <em>Literary Review</em>  </p><p>"Brilliant . . . An enthralling mini-series of colonial adventure . . . [Brendon's] book is stuffed with a myriad spectacular examples of human vanity, folly, depravity and greed--and is all the better for it." <br>--Robert McCrum, <em>The Observer</em>   </p><p>"[A] sumptuous chronicle of the British empire. . . . A compelling and spectacularly detailed retelling of imperial "rise" as well as fall . . . A glittering panoply of decadence, folly, farce and devastation." <br>--Maya Jasanoff, <em>Saturday Guardian</em>   </p><p>"A narrative masterpiece. The settings are exotic, the cast of thousands full of the most eccentric, egotistical, paranoid, swashbuckling players you are likely to meet in any history.... An endlessly engrossing and disturbing stream of anecdotes and vignettes that Brendon tells with extraordinary flair and sympathy, warts and all." --Richard Overy, <em>Sunday Telegraph</em></p>

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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, 'has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire' and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was above all a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the 'white dominions'; the commercial empire of the City of London; and 'Greater India' which contributed markets, manpower and military muscle. This unprecedented history charts how this intricate imperial web was first strengthened, then weakened and finally severed on the rollercoaster of global economic, political and geostrategic upheaval on which it rode from beginning to end.</p>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><strong>Richard Dawkins on <em>The Moral Landscape</em></strong></p><p><em></em><br><em></em></p><p>Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris's previous books that couldn't have been written by any of his fellow "horsemen" of the "new atheism." This book is different, though every bit as readable as the other two. I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. To my surprise, <em>The Moral Landscape</em> has changed all that for me. It should change it for philosophers too. Philosophers of mind have already discovered that they can't duck the study of neuroscience, and the best of them have raised their game as a result. Sam Harris shows that the same should be true of moral philosophers, and it will turn their world exhilaratingly upside down. As for religion, and the preposterous idea that we need God to be good, nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris. <em>--Richard Dawkins</em></p><hr><p><strong>Amazon Exclusive: Q &amp; A – Sam Harris</strong>  </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>Are there right and wrong answers to moral questions?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world—and there clearly are—then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.</p><p><strong>Q: </strong>Are you saying that science can answer such questions?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>Yes, in principle. Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors—ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can act so as to have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply.</p><p><strong>Q: </strong>But can’t moral claims be in conflict? Aren’t there many situations in which one person’s happiness means another’s suffering?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>There as some circumstances like this, and we call these contests ?zero-sum.? Generally speaking, however, the most important moral occasions are not like this. If we could eliminate war, nuclear proliferation, malaria, chronic hunger, child abuse, etc.—these changes would be good, on balance, for everyone. There are surely neurobiological, psychological, and sociological reasons why this is so—which is to say that science could potentially tell us exactly why a phenomenon like child abuse diminishes human well-being.</p><p>But we don’t have to wait for science to do this. We already have very good reasons to believe that mistreating children is bad for everyone. I think it is important for us to admit that this is not a claim about our personal preferences, or merely something our culture has conditioned us to believe. It is a claim about the architecture of our minds and the social architecture of our world. Moral truths of this kind must find their place in any scientific understanding of human experience. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>What if some people simply have different notions about what is truly important in life? How could science tell us that the actions of the Taliban are in fact immoral, when the Taliban think they are behaving morally?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>As I discuss in my book, there may be different ways for people to thrive, but there are clearly many more ways for them not to thrive. The Taliban are a perfect example of a group of people who are struggling to build a society that is obviously less good than many of the other societies on offer. Afghan women have a 12% literacy rate and a life expectancy of 44 years. Afghanistan has nearly the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. It also has one of the highest birthrates. Consequently, it is one of the best places on earth to watch women and infants die. And Afghanistan’s GDP is currently lower than the world’s average was in the year 1820. It is safe to say that the optimal response to this dire situation—that is to say, the most moral response—is not to throw battery acid in the faces of little girls for the crime of learning to read. This may seem like common sense to us—and it is—but I am saying that it is also, at bottom, a claim about biology, psychology, sociology, and economics. It is not, therefore, unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality. In fact, we must say this, the moment we admit that we know anything at all about human well-being.</p><p><strong>Q: </strong>But what if the Taliban simply have different goals in life?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>Well, the short answer is—they don’t. They are clearly seeking happiness in this life, and, more importantly, they imagine that they are securing it in a life to come. They believe that they will enjoy an eternity of happiness after death by following the strictest interpretation of Islamic law here on earth. This is also a claim about which science should have an opinion—as it is almost certainly untrue. There is no question, however, that the Taliban are seeking well-being, in some sense—they just have some very strange beliefs about how to attain it.</p><p>In my book, I try to spell out why moral disagreements do not put the concept of moral truth in jeopardy. In the moral sphere, as in all others, some people don’t know what they are missing. In fact, I suspect that most of us don’t know what we are missing: It must be possible to change human experience in ways that would uncover levels of human flourishing that most of us cannot imagine. In every area of genuine discovery, there are horizons past which we cannot see. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>What do you mean when you talk about a moral landscape?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>This is the phrase I use to describe the space of all possible experience—where the peaks correspond to the heights of well-being and valleys represent the worst possible suffering. We are all someplace on this landscape, faced with the prospect of moving up or down. Given that our experience is fully constrained by the laws of the universe, there must be scientific answers to the question of how best to move upwards, toward greater happiness.</p><p>This is not to say that there is only one right way for human beings to live. There might be many peaks on this landscape—but there are clearly many ways not to be on a peak. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>How could science guide us on the moral landscape?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>Insofar as we can understand human wellbeing, we will understand the conditions that best secure it. Some are obvious, of course. Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I’m not sure we do. Are there genes that make certain people more compassionate than others? What social systems and institutions could maximize our sense of connectedness to the rest of humanity? These questions have answers, and only a science of morality could deliver them.</p><p><strong>Q: </strong>Why is it taboo for a scientist to attempt to answer moral questions?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>I think there are two primary reasons why scientists hesitate to do this. The first, and most defensible, is borne of their appreciation for how difficult it is to understand complex systems. Our investigation of the human mind is in its infancy, even after nearly two centuries of studying the brain. So scientists fear that answers to specific questions about human well-being may be very difficult to come by, and confidence on many points is surely premature. This is true. But, as I argue in my book, mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a huge mistake.</p><p>The second reason is that many scientists have been misled by a combination of bad philosophy and political correctness. This leads them to feel that the only intellectually defensible position to take when in the presence of moral disagreement is to consider all opinions equally valid or equally nonsensical. On one level, this is an understandable and even noble over-correction for our history of racism, ethnocentrism, and imperialism. But it is an over-correction nonetheless. As I try to show in my book, it is not a sign of intolerance for us to notice that some cultures and sub-cultures do a terrible job of producing human lives worth living. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>What is the difference between there being no answers in practice and no answers in principle, and why is this distinction important in understanding the relationship between human knowledge and human values?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>There are an infinite number of questions that we will never answer, but which clearly have answers. How many fish are there in the world’s oceans at this moment? We will never know. And yet, we know that this question, along with an infinite number of questions like it, have correct answers. We simply can’t get access to the data in any practical way.</p><p>There are many questions about human subjectivity—and about the experience of conscious creatures generally—that have this same structure. Which causes more human suffering, stealing or lying? Questions like this are not at all meaningless, in that they must have answers, but it could be hopeless to try to answer them with any precision. Still, once we admit that any discussion of human values must relate to a larger reality in which actual answers exist, we can then reject many answers as obviously wrong. If, in response to the question about the world’s fish, someone were to say, ?There are exactly a thousand fish in the sea.? We know that this person is not worth listening to. And many people who have strong opinions on moral questions have no more credibility than this. Anyone who thinks that gay marriage is the greatest problem of the 21st century, or that women should be forced to live in burqas, is not worth listening to on the subject of morality. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>What do you think the role of religion is in determining human morality?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>I think it is generally an unhelpful one. Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but in so far as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious. You do not need to believe that the Bible was dictated by the Creator of the Universe, or that Jesus Christ was his son, to see the wisdom and utility of following the Golden Rule.</p><p>The problem with religious morality is that it often causes people to care about the wrong things, leading them to make choices that needlessly perpetuate human suffering. Consider the Catholic Church: This is an institution that excommunicates women who want to become priests, but it does not excommunicate male priests who rape children. The Church is more concerned about stopping contraception than stopping genocide. It is more worried about gay marriage than about nuclear proliferation. When we realize that morality relates to questions of human and animal well-being, we can see that the Catholic Church is as confused about morality as it is about cosmology. It is not offering an alternative moral framework; it is offering a false one. </p><p><strong>Q: </strong>So people don’t need religion to live an ethical life?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>No. And a glance at the lives of most atheists, and at the most atheistic societies on earth—Denmark, Sweden, etc.—proves that this is so. Even the faithful can’t really get their deepest moral principles from religion—because books like the Bible and the Qur’an are full of barbaric injunctions that all decent and sane people must now reinterpret or ignore. How is it that most Jews, Christians, and Muslims are opposed to slavery? You don’t get this moral insight from scripture, because the God of Abraham expects us to keep slaves. Consequently, even religious fundamentalists draw many of their moral positions from a wider conversation about human values that is not, in principle, religious. We are the guarantors of the wisdom we find in scripture, such as it is. And we are the ones who must ignore God when he tells us to kill people for working on the Sabbath.</p><p><strong>Q: </strong>How will admitting that there are right and wrong answers to issues of human and animal flourishing transform the way we think and talk about morality?</p><p><strong>Harris: </strong>What I’ve tried to do in my book is give a framework in which we can think about human values in universal terms. Currently, the most important questions in human life—questions about what constitutes a good life, which wars we should fight or not fight, which diseases should be cured first, etc.—are thought to lie outside the purview of science, in principle. Therefore, we have divorced the most important questions in human life from the context in which our most rigorous and intellectually honest thinking gets done.</p><p>Moral truth entirely depends on actual and potential changes in the well-being of conscious creatures. As such, there are things to be discovered about it through careful observation and honest reasoning. It seems to me that the only way we are going to build a global civilization based on shared values—allowing us to converge on the same political, economic, and environmental goals—is to admit that questions about right and wrong and good and evil have answers, in the same way the questions about human health do. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>“Sam Harris breathes intellectual fire into an ancient debate. Reading this thrilling, audacious book, you feel the ground shifting beneath your feet. Reason has never had a more passionate advocate.”</p><p>—Ian McEwan  </p><p>Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris's previous books that couldn't have been written by any of his fellow 'horsemen' of the 'new atheism'. This book is different, though every bit as readable as the other two. I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. To my surprise, <em>The Moral Landscape</em> has changed all that for me. It should change it for philosophers too. Philosophers of mind have already discovered that they can't duck the study of neuroscience, and the best of them have raised their game as a result. Sam Harris shows that the same should be true of moral philosophers, and it will turn their world exhilaratingly upside down. As for religion, and the preposterous idea that we need God to be good, nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris.</p><p>--Richard Dawkins</p><p>“Reading Sam Harris is like drinking water from a cool stream on a hot day. He has the rare ability to frame arguments that are not only stimulating, they are downright nourishing, even if you don’t always agree with him! In this new book he argues from a philosophical and a neurobiological perspective that science can and should determine morality. His discussions will provoke secular liberals and religious conservatives alike, who jointly argue from different perspectives that there always will be an unbridgeable chasm between merely knowing what is and discerning what should be. As was the case with Harris’ previous books, readers are bound to come away with previously firm convictions about the world challenged, and a vital new awareness about the nature and value of science and reason in our lives.”</p><p><em>—</em>Lawrence M. Krauss, Foundation Professor and Director of the ASU Origins Project at Arizona State University_, <em>author of</em> The Physics of Star Trek,_ and_, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science _  </p><p>“A lively, provocative, and timely new look at one of the deepest problems in the world of ideas. Harris makes a powerful case for a morality that is based on human flourishing and thoroughly enmeshed with science and rationality. It is a tremendously appealing vision, and one that no thinking person can afford to ignore.”</p><p>--Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate. </p>

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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><em>The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death</em>. The best thing about reading a Huston novel is that you never see it coming--laughter, tears, the passing urge to vomit--everything is a surprise, creating a wholly unsettling and exciting reading experience. <em>The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death</em> has all the makings of a perfect Charlie Huston novel--the down-but-not-out antihero, the outrageous supporting characters (each of whom deserves their own spin-off), the very bad situation involving money and violence, and the hilariously inappropriate dialogue that is Huston's signature--but with one surprising addition, hope. It does little good to break down the plot of a book this bizarre and brilliant. You're just going to have to trust us (and our Guest Reviewer, Stephen King), and read it. --_Daphne Durham_  </p><hr><p><strong>Amazon Exclusive: Stephen King Reviews <em>The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death</em></strong>  </p><p><em></em>Stephen King is the author of too many bestselling books to name here, but some of our favorites include: <em>The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death</em> below.   </p><p>For more from Charlie Huston, check out his "true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean up, and made" on Amazon's books blog, <em></em></p><p>There are some things you never wonder about until someone--usually someone whose mind lives on Weird Street--brings them to your attention. Who cuts the barber’s hair? How does a guy wind up with the job of test-smelling armpits for a deoderant company? Or de-wrinkling dress shoes before they’re put on sale? Why does one kid become a college dean while another grows up to be a key grip? And just what is a key grip, anyway?</p><p>Here’s another one. Who scrubs down the scene after a spectacularly messy death--a guy who shoots himself in the head, let’s say, or dies of natural causes in a hot back room and then goes undiscovered for a couple of weeks? What sort of janitorial problems would such work entail? It turns out there are firms that specialize in those problems, and in the Weird Street world of Charlie Huston, a couple of these companies might even do battle over the smelly, maggoty spoils of war.</p><p>“Trauma scene and waste cleaning is a growth industry,” remarks Po Sin, the owner/operator of Clean Team. The observation comes early in Charlie Huston’s terrific new novel, which is about just what the title suggests: getting rid of the messy stuff after the deal goes down.</p><p>When <em>The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death</em> opens, Webster Fillmore Goodhue--another in a long line of likeably slack Huston protagonists--is sponging off his friend Chev, who runs a sleazier-than-thou tattoo parlor. Enter the proprietor of Clean Team, who knows Web from Web’s previous life as an elementary school teacher (a career that ended badly). Po Sin needs help in his particular growth-industry. Web agrees to a little blood- and brain-scrubbing not because he particularly wants a job but because he’s suffered his own trauma and finds cleaning up other people’s end-of-life messes strangely soothing.</p><p>Enter Soledad, a beautiful young girl whose father just aired out his brains with a 9mm. Also enter Jaime, her half-bright half-brother who imagines himself a Hollywood playa but can’t get out of his own way. There are many things to love about Charlie Huston’s fiction--he’s a brilliant storyteller, and writes the best dialogue since George V. Higgins--but what pushes my personal happy-button is his morbid sense of humor and seemingly effortless ability to create scary/funny bad guys who make Beavis and Butthead look like Rhodes Scholars.</p><p>There are a lot of those in this book, and several I-can’t-believe-I-laughed-at-that scenes of grue (I can’t even talk about the pipe-bomb thing, not on a family website), but the best thing about <em>Mystic Arts</em> is how decency and heroism rise to the top in spite of everyone’s best efforts to crush them under heel.</p><p>Web wanders from the nightmarish underworld of body clean-up into the equally nightmarish worlds of hijacking and smuggling; he endures cross, double-cross, and triple-cross; he pees his pants while trying to shield his girlfriend from a bullet. He’s scared but never cowardly, down but never completely out. He is, in short, a guy worth watching.</p><p>So’s Charlie Huston. He’s written several very good books (including the <em>Caught Stealing</em> trilogy and the Joe Pitt novels, which concern a PI who’s also a vampire), but this is the first authentically great one, a runaway freight that feels like a combination of William Burroughs and James Ellroy. <em>Mystic Arts</em> is, however, fiercely original--very much its own thing.</p><p>Besides, admit it: you’ve always wanted to know how to get blood out of a deep-pile carpet.</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Noir master Huston (_The Shotgun Rule_) should win himself a whole new audience with this bizarre and utterly grotesque stand-alone, told mostly through dialogue that highlights the author's uncanny ear for the spoken word. Former Los Angeles grade school teacher Web Goodhue, now a full-time slacker suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, falls into a job on a crime scene cleanup crew, scrubbing up the remains of the recently deceased. After the crew has finished cleaning up a messy suicide scene in Malibu, Web gets a phone call from the dead man's daughter, Soledad. She and her thug half-brother have another big mess on their hands that needs cleaning, on the QT. Unable to resist the beautiful Soledad, Web soon finds himself in way over his head. Huston, one of his generation's finest and hippest talents, shows in grisly detail what cleaning up after the dead entails. This one should appeal to Chuck Palahniuk fans as well as hard-boiled crime readers. <em>(Jan.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>

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<div><meta charset="utf-8"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; "><h3 class="productDescriptionSource" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 1.23em; font-weight: normal; margin-top: 0.75em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.375em; margin-left: -15px; clear: both; ">Product Description</h3><div class="productDescriptionWrapper" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "><b>The Strunk and White of statistics team up to help the average person navigate the numbers in the news </b><br><br>Drawing on their hugely popular BBC Radio 4 show <i>More or Less</i>, journalist Michael Blastland and internationally known economist Andrew Dilnot delight, amuse, and convert American mathphobes by showing how our everyday experiences make sense of numbers. <br><br>The radical premise of The Numbers Game is to show how much we already know and give practical ways to use our knowledge to become cannier consumers of the media. If you've ever wondered what "average" really means, whether the scare stories about cancer risk should convince you to change your behavior, or whether a story you read in the paper is biased (and how), you need this book. Blastland and Dilnot show how to survive and thrive on the torrent of numbers that pours through everyday life.</div></span></div>


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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>"State-of-the-art scholarship...has come to stand as the edition of record of Shakespeare's poems and plays."--San Diego Union-Tribune<br>"Includes stage directions, introductions, and a trove of other scholarly goodies. A beauty."--Library Journal (starred review)  </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Hailed by The Washington Post as "a definitive synthesis of the best editions" and by The Times of London as "a monument to Shakespearean scholarship," The Oxford Shakespeare is the ultimate anthology of the Bard's work: the most authoritative edition of the plays and poems ever published. Now, almost two decades after the original volume, Oxford is proud to announce a thoroughly updated second edition, including for the first time the texts of The Reign of Edward III and Sir Thomas More, recognizing these two plays officially as authentic works by Shakespeare. This beautiful collection is the product of years of full-time research by a team of British and American scholars and represents the most thorough examination ever undertaken of the nature and authority of Shakespeare's work. The editors reconsidered every detail of the text in the light of modern scholarship and they thoroughly re-examined the earliest printed versions of the plays, firmly establishing the canon and chronological order of composition. All stage directions have been reconsidered in light of original staging, and many new directions for essential action have been added. This superb volume also features a brief introduction to each work as well as an illuminating General Introduction. Finally, the editors have added a wealth of secondary material, including an essay on language, a list of contemporary allusions to Shakespeare, an index of Shakespearean characters, a glossary, a consolidated bibliography, and an index of first lines of the Sonnets. Compiled by the world's leading authorities, packed with information, and attractively designed, The Oxford Shakespeare is the gold standard of Shakespearean anthologies. </p>

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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Many writers have portrayed the cruelty people inflict upon each other in the name of war or ideology or garden-variety hate, but few books will surpass Kosinski's first novel, <strong>The Painted Bird</strong>, for the sheer creepiness in its savagery. The story follows an abandoned young boy who wanders alone through the frozen bogs and broken towns of Eastern Europe during and after World War II, trying to survive. His experiences and actions occur at and beyond the limits of what might be called humanity, but Kosinski never averts his eyes, nor allows us to. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>Semiautobiographical novel by Jerzy Kosinski, published in 1965 and revised in 1976. The ordeals of the central character parallel Kosinski's own experiences during World War II. A dark-haired Polish child who is taken for either a Gypsy or a Jew loses his parents in the mayhem of war and wanders through the countryside at the mercy of the brutal, thickheaded peasants he meets in the villages. He learns how to stay alive at any cost, turning survival into a moral imperative. Full of graphic scenes depicting rape, torture, and bestiality, the novel portrays evil in all its manifestations and speaks of human isolation as inevitable. -- __</p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Arguing that capitalism is a cultural—rather than purely economic—phenomenon, Appleby (_Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination_) traces its trajectory through European, American, and Asian successes and setbacks, its unhappy experiments in colonization, the world wars, and into contemporary India and China. She narrates the rise of capitalism as a process of accretion, starting with Dutch agricultural innovations that were adopted and improved upon by the British. This set England on the path to controlling famine and, ultimately, freed capital and labor for trade. Appleby turns Marxism on its head as she proposes that the new social relations introduced in England as a result of converting common land into freeholds were the consequence, not the cause, of the transformation in English farming. If this sounds like breathless global time travel, it is still a laudable effort at demonstrating that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of capitalism. Both scholarly and accessible, this book unpacks a complex web of seemingly unrelated events; its dazzling achievements are tarnished only by multiple misnomers: there is no city called Calico in India (there's a Calicut) and no language called Hindu (it's Hindi). <em>(Jan.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Historian Appleby traces capitalism (a system based on individual investments in the production of marketable goods) from early industrialization to the present global economy. She explores the benchmarks in capitalism’s ascent, looking at how this system transformed politics while churning up practices, thoughts, values and ideals that had long prevailed within the cocoon of custom. It changed the way people thought and planned, and the author shows how different societies respond to its challenges up to the twenty-first century and the world recession of 2008–09. She explains that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the era of deregulation from the late 1970s to 1999, while vast sums of money circulated through global markets and the growth in financial assets outpaced real economic activity. Appleby concludes that since capitalism is a set of practices and institutions that permits billions of people to pursue their interests in the marketplace, it is highly likely that panics and bubbles will occur again. This is an excellent book. --Mary Whaley </p>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>The scope of Philip Bobbitt's <em>The Shield of Achilles</em> is breathtaking: the interplay, over the last six centuries, among war, jurisprudence, and the reshaping of countries ("states," in Bobbitt's vocabulary). Bobbitt posits that certain wars should be deemed epochal--that is, seen as composed of many "smaller" wars. For example, according to Bobbitt the epochal war of the 20th century began in 1914 and ended with the collapse of communism in 1990. These military affairs--and their subsequent "ultimate" peace agreements--have caused, each in their own way, revolutionary reconstructions of the idea and actuality of statehood and, following, of relationships between these various new entities. Of these reconstructions (including the princely state, the kingly state, and the nation-state), Bobbitt is most interested in the current incarnation, which he calls the market-state: one whose borders are scuffed and hazy at best (certainly compared to earlier territorial markers) and whose strengths, weaknesses, citizens, and enemies roam across cyberspace rather than plains and valleys. <em>The Shield of Achilles</em> is massive, erudite, and demanding--at once highly abstract and extremely detailed. There is about it an air of detached erudition, one noticeably free of the easy "decline and fall" hysteria too often present in contemporary historical analyses. <em>--H. O'Billovich</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The world is at a pivotal point, argues Bobbitt, as the nation-state, developed over six centuries as the optimal institution for waging war and organizing peace, gives way to the market-state. Nation-states derive legitimacy from promising to improve the material welfare of their citizens, specifically by providing security and order. Market-states offer to maximize the opportunity of their people. Nation-states use force and law to bring about desired results. Market-states use various forms of market relationships. Bobbitt, who has an endowed chair at the University of Texas and has written five previous books on constitutional law and on nuclear strategy, argues in sprawling fashion that this paradigm shift is essentially a consequence of the "Long War" of 1914-1990, a struggle among communism, fascism and parliamentarism that, through innovation and mimicry, generated a fundamentally new constitutional and strategic dynamic that in turn generated a fundamentally new "society of states." Central to Bobbitt's thesis is the postulate that international order is a consequence of domestic order. In the work's most stimulating section, Bobbitt discusses three possible ways of reorganizing the latter. The "Meadow," essentially an extrapolation of socio-political patterns currently dominant in the U.S., features high levels of individualism around the world at the expense of collective behavior at any level. The "Park," based on a European alternate, emphasizes regionalism. The "Garden" predicates successful market states disengaging from international affairs and emphasizing renewed internal community. None of these systems will eliminate war, but the nation-state is declining, Bobbitt argues, essentially because nonstate actors confront the nation-state with threats it cannot effectively respond to. This big book is provocative and richly textured, but too often Bobbitt's arguments are obscured by his historically digressive presentation. </p>

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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Smith, a UCLA geography professor, explores megatrends through computer model projections to describe "with reasonable scientific credibility, what our world might look like in forty years' time, should things continue as they are now." Laying out "ground rules" for himself--including an assumption of incremental advances rather than big technology breakthroughs and no accounting for "hidden genies" such as a decades-long depression or meteorite impact--he identifies four global forces likely to determine our future: human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource "services" as photosynthesis and bee pollination; globalization; and climate change. He sees the "New North" as "something like America in 1803, just after the Louisiana Purchase... harsh, dangerous, and ecologically fragile." Aside from his observations of "a profound return of autonomy and dignity to many aboriginal people" through increasing political power and integration into the global economy, Smith's predictions, limited by his conservative rules, are far from earthshaking, and suspending his rules for a chapter, he admits that "the physics of sliding glaciers and ice sheet collapses" as well as melting permafrost methane release are beyond current models, and that even globalization could reverse, with "political genies even harder to anticipate than permafrost ones." <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>How will civilization change over the next 40 years if humanity balloons to nine billion, sea level rises by a foot and atmospheric temperature by several degrees, and globalization continues apace? From those assumptions, Smith, a university-employed geophysicist, posits answers with a focus on the Arctic Ocean and its coastline. Familiar with the Far North through scientific field trips, Smith embeds personal observations into his predictions about the effects of boreal warming. Becoming more accessible to ships, Arctic regions in Russia, Alaska, and Canada will experience a raw-materials bonanza, with oil, natural gas, minerals, and water resources likely to be exploited as permafrost melts and summer sea ice recedes. Festooned with data, his discussions of such prospects valuably avoid either environmental or industrial advocacy and lay a factual foundation for his readers to learn how demographic and economic trends in the world’s southerly population belts might influence development of the Arctic. Concluding with a half-dozen events that could upset his forecast, Smith exhibits trend-spotting skill in this readable account of the Arctic frontier. --Gilbert Taylor </p>

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<div><h3>From</h3><p>Only the supremely self-confident put forth all-encompassing theories of world history, and Morris is one such daredevil. An archaeologist by academic specialty, he advances a quasi-deterministic construct that is suitable for nonacademics. From a repeatedly enunciated premise that humans by nature are indolent, avaricious, and fearful, Morris holds that such traits, when combined with sociology and geography, explain history right from the beginning, when humanity trudged out of Africa, through the contemporary rivalry between China and America. Such temporal range leaves scant room for individual human agency: Morris names the names of world history, but in his narrative, leaders and tyrants, at best, muddle through patterns of history that are beyond their power to shape. And those patterns, he claims, can be numerically measured by a “social development index” that he applies to every epochal change from agriculture to the industrial revolution. However, the reading is not as heavy as it may sound. His breezy style and what-if imagination for alternative scenarios should maintain audience interest; whether his sweeping perspective convinces is another matter altogether. --Gilbert Taylor </p><h3>Review</h3><p>Praise for <em>Why the West Rules-for Now</em></p><p>“In an era when cautious academics too often confine themselves to niggling discussions of pipsqueak topics, it is a joy to see a scholar take a bold crack at explaining the vast sweep of human progress. . .</p><p>Readers of <em>Why the West Rules—For Now</em> are unlikely to see the history of the world in quite the same way ever again. And that can't be said of many books on any topic. Morris has penned a tour de force.”—Keith Monroe, <em>The Virginian-Pilot</em></p><p>“If you read one history book this year, if you read one this decade, this is the one.”— Tim O’ Connell, <em>The Florida Times-Union</em></p><p>__ </p><p>“A monumental effort...Morris is an engaging writer with deep insights from archaeology and ancient history that offer us compelling visions about how the past influences the future.”—Michael D. Langan, <em>Buffalo News</em></p><p>“[Morris] has written the first history of the world that really makes use of what modern technology can offer to the interpretation of the historical process. The result is a path-breaking work that lays out what modern history should look like.”—Harold James, Financial Times</p><p>“Morris is a lucid thinker and a fine writer. . .possessed of a welcome sense of humor that helps him guide us through this grand game of history as if he were an erudite sportscaster.” —Orville Schell, <em>The New York Times Book Review </em></p><p>“A remarkable book that may come to be as widely read as Paul Kennedy’s 1987 work, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.’ Like Mr Kennedy’s epic, Mr Morris’s ‘Why the West Rules—For Now’ uses history and an overarching theory to address the anxieties of the present . . . This is an important book—one that challenges, stimulates and entertains. Anyone who does not believe there are lessons to be learned from history should start here.” —_The Economist _</p><p>__ </p><p>“Morris’ new book illustrates perfectly why one really scholarly book about the past is worth a hundred fanciful works of futurology. Morris is the world’s most talented ancient historian, a man as much at home with state-of-the-art archaeology as with the classics as they used to be studied . . . He has brilliantly pulled off what few modern academics would dare to attempt: a single-volume history of the world that offers a bold and original answer to the question, Why did the societies that make up 'the West' pull ahead of 'the Rest' not once but twice, and most spectacularly in the modern era after around 1500? Wearing his impressive erudition lightly — indeed, writing with a wit and clarity that will delight the lay reader — Morris uses his own ingenious index of social development as the basis for his answer.” —Niall Ferguson, <em>Foreign Affairs</em></p><p>“A formidable, richly engrossing effort to determine why Western institutions dominate the world . . . Readers will enjoy [Morris’s] lively prose and impressive combination of scholarship . . . with economics and science. A superior contribution to the grand-theory-of-human-history genre.” —_Kirkus Reviews_ (starred review)  </p><p>“Ian Morris has returned history to the position it once held: no longer a series of dusty debates, nor simple stories—although he has many stories to tell and tells them brilliantly—but a true <em>magister vitae</em>, ‘teacher of life.’ Morris explains how the shadowy East-West divide came about, why it really does matter, and how one day it might end up. His vision is dazzling, and his prose irresistible. Everyone from Sheffield to Shanghai who wants to know not only how they came to be who and where they are but where their children and their children’s children might one day end up must read this book.” —Anthony Pagden, author of _Worlds and War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West  </p><p><em>“This is an astonishing work by Ian Morris: hundreds of pages of the latest information dealing with every aspect of change. Then, the questions of the future: What will a new distribution bring about? Will Europe undergo a major change? Will the millions of immigrants impose a new set of rules on the rest? There was a time when Europe could absorb any and all newcomers. Now the newcomers may dictate the terms. The West may continue to rule, but the rule may be very different.” —David S. Landes, author of </em>The Wealth and Poverty of Nations  </p><p>_“Here you have three books wrapped into one: an exciting novel that happens to be true; an entertaining but thorough historical account of everything important that happened to any important people in the last ten millennia; and an educated guess about what will happen in the future. Read, learn, and enjoy!” —Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography at UCLA, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of <em>Guns, Germs, and Steel</em>, <em>Collapse</em>, and _Natural Experiments of History<br>_</p><p>“Ian Morris is a classical archaeologist, an ancient historian, and a writer whose breathtaking vision and scope make him fit to be ranked alongside the likes of Jared Diamond and David Landes. His magnum opus is a tour not just d’horizon but de force, taking us on a spectacular journey to and from the two nodal cores of the Euramerican West and the Asian East, alighting and reflecting as suggestively upon 10,800 BC as upon AD 2010. The shape of globalizing history may well never be quite the same again.” —Paul Cartledge, A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, Clare College  </p><p>“At last—a brilliant historian with a light touch. We should all rejoice.” —John Julius Norwich  </p><p>“Deeply thought-provoking and engagingly lively, broad in sweep and precise in detail.” —Jonathan Fenby, author of _Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present  </p><p>_“Morris’s history of world dominance sparkles as much with exotic ideas as with extraordinary tales. <em>Why the West Rules—for Now</em> is both a riveting drama and a major step toward an integrated theory of history.” —Richard Wrangham, author of _Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human  </p><p>_“The nearest thing to a unified field theory of history we are ever likely to get. With wit and wisdom, Ian Morris deploys the techniques and insights of the new ancient history to address the biggest of all historical questions: Why on earth did the West beat the Rest? I loved it.” —Niall Ferguson, author of <em>The Ascent of Money</em></p>

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<h3>Review</h3><p>Every engineer—and certainly every engineering student—should read this book….It is, in a nutshell, the engineer's manifesto. -- _Guy Kawasaki, author of <em>_The Macintosh Way</em>  </p><p>Everyone should enjoy Woz's very personal and engaging story….What a wild ride! -- _Ray Kurzweil, inventor and author of <em>_Singularity Is Near</em>  </p><p>Worth waiting for…adds intriguing new information to the history of the origins of the personal computer revolution. -- _Alan Deutschman, author of <em>_The Second Coming of Steve Jobs</em></p><h3>Product Description</h3><p><strong>The mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time.</strong>  </p><p>Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen? The result was the first true personal computer, the Apple I, a widely affordable machine that anyone could understand and figure out how to use.  </p><p>Wozniak's life—before and after Apple—is a "home-brew" mix of brilliant discovery and adventure, as an engineer, a concert promoter, a fifth-grade teacher, a philanthropist, and an irrepressible prankster. From the invention of the first personal computer to the rise of Apple as an industry giant, <em>iWoz</em> presents a no-holds-barred, rollicking, firsthand account of the humanist inventor who ignited the computer revolution. 16 pages of illustrations. </p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Akashic's latest city-themed crime anthology successfully captures the immense diversity of the Bronx, from the mean streets of the South Bronx to affluent Riverdale, in 19 tales by authors both well known and obscure. The most imaginative entry, Joseph Wallace's The Big Five, about a hunter who targets his prey in the Bronx Zoo as part of a national contest, concludes with a satisfying noir twist. Lawrence Block's Riverdale story, Rude Awakening, also surprises the reader with its clever resolution of a one-night stand. Particularly inventive is Kevin Baker's grim The Cheers Like Waves, set in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. Rozan, herself a contributor, has put together one of the series' better entries, with memorable tales of betrayal and despair that reflect the borough's varied ethnic populations and geography. <em>(Aug.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Brand-new stories by: Thomas Adcock, Kevin Baker, Thomas Bentil, Lawrence Block, Jerome Charyn, Suzanne Chazin, Terrence Cheng, Ed Dee, Joanne Dobson, Robert Hughes, Marlon James, Sandra Kitt, Rita Laken, Miles Marshall Lewis, Pat Picciarelli, Abraham Rodriguez Jr., S.J. Rozan, Steven Torres, and Joe Wallace. </p><p><strong>S.J. Rozan</strong> was born and raised in the Bronx and is a lifelong New Yorker. She’s the author of eight novels in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, and of the stand-alones <em>Absent Friends</em> and <em>In This Rain</em> (forthcoming). Her books have won Edgar, Nero, Macavity, and Shamus awards for best novel. She’s at work on another series novel, <em>Shanghai Moon.</em></p>

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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><strong></strong>: With touching simplicity, author Myron Uhlberg recounts his complex childhood spent bridging the gap between sign language and the spoken word. As the hearing son of deaf parents, young Myron served as their emissary to the audible world while enduring the painful ignorance of a society that dismissed the hearing-impaired as "dummies." Yet eliciting pity is not the aim of this memoir. <em>Hands of My Father</em> is less about the challenges Uhlberg faced, and more about the love that bound his family together. Amid each tale of hardship, he describes moments so profoundly tender that you are immediately excused for the lump forming in the back of your throat. "All that I needed, in order to understand how much my father loved me," he explains, "was the feel of his arms around me." Though there may have been much to struggle against, Uhlberg's stories reveal that he had even more to be thankful for. - <em>Dave Callanan</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>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. <em>(Apr.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>

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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Istanbul straddles the divide of Europe and Asia, and its polyglot population of 12 million seethes with political, religious and sexual tensions, as shown in the 16 stories in this strong entry in Akashic's noir anthology series. Most of the stories are fittingly dark, though a couple are lit by a macabre humor: Hikmet Hukumenoglu's The Smell of Fish, about a woman's efforts to discourage suitors, and Algan Sezginturedi's Around Here, Somewhere, about a drug runner's attempted escape. Sadik Yemni's Burn and Go delivers a memorable account of a childhood accident's fearsome consequences. A lonely older woman and a polite young man share a ride in Feryal Tilmaç's fateful Hitching in the Lodos. Most contributors are either natives of Istanbul or longtime residents, and their stories reflect religious extremism (Jessica Lutz's All Quiet) and governmental repression (editor Ziyalan's Black Palace) as well as the disaffection common to the genre. This is a welcome complement to the mostly historical mysteries set in Istanbul. <em>(Nov.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>At the crossroads between East and West, Constantinople (now Istanbul) has been a seething melting pot of cultures for centuries. The stories collected here are set up and down both banks of the Bosporus. The authors do an excellent job introducing readers to a city unknown to many American readers, exploring the many issues of religion and culture that face modern Istanbul. Landscape is essential to these stories, all of which convince the reader that they couldn’t possibly have been set anywhere other than Istanbul. Recommend the collection to fans of Mehmet Murat Somer’s Prophet Murders (2008), also set in contemporary Istanbul. --Jessica Moyer </p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>A wonderfully wicked new anthology from the editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime   It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder.  In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has brought together all of the era's great crime-fighting females- plus a few choice crooks, including Four Square Jane and the Sorceress of the Strand.</p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p><em>Captain Shane Schofi eld and his elite team of marines is about to discover . . .</em><strong>There is no hell like a man-made one.</strong>It is an island that doesn’t appear on any maps. A secret location where the government conducts classified experiments. Experiments that have gone terribly wrong. . . . When all contact with the mysterious island is suddenly and inexplicably lost, Captain Shane Schofi eld and four crack Special Forces units parachute in. Nothing prepares them for what they fi nd—the island is a testing ground for a deadly breed of genetically enhanced supersoldiers. You could say they’ve just entered hell, but this place is much, much worse. . . . </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p><strong>Matthew Reilly</strong> is the international bestselling author of eight novels: <em>The 6 Sacred Stones, 7 Deadly Wonders, Ice Station, Temple, Contest, Area 7, Scarecrow</em>, and the children's book <em>Hover Car Racer</em>, and one novella, <em>Hell Island</em>. His books are published in more than eighteen languages in twenty countries, and he has sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Some know her as the star of the 1960s TV show That Girl, or creator of Free to Be... You and Me, or perhaps major fund-raiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Thomas, author of five bestselling books, here focuses on a role she's had her entire life: daughter. Laughter was the soundtrack for Thomas's formative years in 1950s Beverly Hills. Her father, comedian Danny Thomas, regularly had funny friends--including Bob Hope, Sid Caesar, and George Burns--over to the family home. The author, actress, feminist, and philanthropist shares fond memories of enjoying and learning from these comedy luminaries, and of being a Hollywood kid long before game-changers like the Internet and cable TV. She chronicles her path from childhood to adulthood; particularly interesting tidbits include her meeting and marrying Phil Donahue, becoming friends with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, and, with her siblings, "producing" her father's funeral. But this book is more than a well-written memoir. Thomas also includes interviews with comedy powerhouses galore, from Tina Fey to Alan Alda, Chris Rock to Ben and Jerry Stiller. On the whole, this book offers a delightful firsthand look at how comedy has become integral to American culture--and the way it's shaped one woman's colorful life. <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Thomas, star of the classic sitcom That Girl and daughter of comedy legend Danny Thomas, has taken an interesting approach to the usual Hollywood memoir. Chapters exploring her life as the daughter of comedy royalty, and her struggles to establish an independent identity for herself, alternate with profiles of contemporary comedians (Seinfeld, Leno, Stiller, Rock, Crystal, Rivers, Williams, Fey, Wright, and Colbert, among others). We see how her father inspired her, and we also see how he inspired the professionals who came after him. Thomas’ personal stories are heartwarming and entertaining. Her father, who came by his legendary status by dint of hard work and perfect delivery, comes across as a driven man who always made time for his family and who never made any secret of the fact that he loved his little girl. It was a privileged childhood, to be sure, and you can’t help being a little envious of someone who grew up around the likes of Milton Berle, George Burns, and Sid Caesar. The profiles of other comedians allow us to see Danny Thomas through others’ eyes, too, offering a different perspective on the man and his legacy. An engaging, highly informative memoir—definitely not the routine show-biz autobiography. --David Pitt </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>After the dissolution of her marriage, beautiful English artist Leonora Manin is hired as an apprentice glassblower in the Venetian suburb of Murano, in Fiorato's strong U.S. debut. Leonora's ancestor was master glassmaker Corradino Manin, and her new boss plans to exploit that connection. But centuries-old jealousies and treachery surface and the public relations campaign is suddenly canceled. A modern-day relative of Corradino's mentor resents Leonora, while a journalist who was once involved with Alessandro Bardolino, Leonora's new love, decides she wants him back. Complex connections, but nothing compared to those in Corradino's time, when draconian Venetian laws enslaved glassmakers on Murano to insure techniques would remain exclusive to Venice. The author's descriptive prose brings the beauty and danger of 17th-century Venice vividly to life, when Corradino became a traitor seeking freedom for himself and his secret daughter. Leonora's determined to investigate Corradino, but throughout, Alessandro's allegiance is suspect. Those who enjoy intrigue and European history will be easily drawn into this romantic story. <em>(June)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Switching between modern-day and seventeenth-century Venice, Fiorato’s novel is an intriguing mix of history, mystery, art, music, poetry, romance, and politics. Corradino Manin’s family was brutally murdered by Venice’s Council of Ten; Corradino was only saved because his patron saw in the young boy a prodigious gift for glassblowing. Corradino quickly learned to make exquisite glass mirrors and chandeliers for which the Venetian island of Murano soon became renowned. The process of making Murano glass quickly became a secret jealously guarded by the government, but when Corradino is invited to use his talents in the court of King Louis XIV, he is sorely tempted, even though it means leaving his beloved little daughter, Leonora, and endangering his life. This gripping plot is interwoven with a second, similarly intriguing story revolving around another Leonora, this one a modern-day descendent of Corradino. Leonora has come to Venice to escape an unhappy marriage, enhance her skill as a glassblower, and learn more about her mysterious ancestor. Writing with charm and authenticity, Fiorato produces a blend of historical mystery and modern romance that is thoroughly entertaining. --Emily Melton </p>


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Tara Sharp is back in a new high octane mystery... This time she's helping out motor racing mogul Bolo Ignatius whose team is being sabotaged and she's also coaching the girls the local high class bordello on the finer points of body language reading. Tara Sharp is at it again! Things are finally looking up on the work front, which may just mean she'll be able to escape living in her parent's garage. Not only has the owner of a motorcycle racing team put her on retainer to find out who's sabotaging his bikes, but a wealthy 'madam' (of the bordello variety) wants her 'girls' coached on how to read their clients more astutely. But dark clouds are gathering. The word is that local gang lord, Johnny Viaspa, has engaged a hitman known as 'the Finisher' to clean up some 'unfinished business'. And given her previous history with Viaspa, Tara has reason to be concerned... As if that weren't bad enough, Wal, her narcoleptic security chief is suddenly homeless and is eyeing off the couch in Tara's digs while talking about 'keeping an eye on her'.


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>George presents a romanticized Henry VIII and fails to capture the "brilliance, the cunning or the ruthlessness of the grim monarch who tore down monasteries to fill his coffers, executed two of his six wives and sacrificed friend and enemy alike for political expediency," PW commented. <br />Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"A remarkable achievement...Magnificently researched and admirably written." --_Mary Stewart_  </p><p>"Her novel is a...banquet feast for most readers...astonishing. There's rousing drama, robust atmosphere and consistently solid characterization; and finally, Margaret George's triumph is anchored in the urgent rhythm her writing attains." --_Forth Worth Star Telegram_  </p><p>"It doth brim with lust, violence, cruelty and living conservation...Margaret George has found a new and fresh way to tell the story. --_Detroit Free Press_<br />-- <em>Review</em></p>


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<p class="description"><b><u>SUMMARY:</u></b><br>The Brit Writers' Awards (www.britwriters.co.uk) is nothing short of a writing and publishing phenomenon. It has attracted tens of thousands of entries in its eight categories and is offering the largest prize ever for unpublished writers in a creative writing competition. Infinite Ideas will publish this year's deserved winner of the Children's story category, Catherine Cooper's wonderful novel The Golden Acorn. When Jack Brenin finds a golden acorn lying in the grass, little does he know that it is the beginning of a thrilling and magical adventure. Just an ordinary boy, Jack has been chosen for a hugely important task, and enters a world he believed only existed in legend. Full of twists and turns, talking ravens and mischievous Spriggans, The Golden Acorn is a hugely entertaining and exciting tale from a very talented new author. Your kids will love it, and so will you!</p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p><strong>NYC's #1 detective, Michael Bennett, has a huge problem--the Son of Sam, the Werewolf of Wisteria and the Mad Bomber are all back. The city has never been more terrified!</strong>  </p><p><em></em>Tick--a killer's countdown begins  </p><p><em></em>A rash of horrifying crimes tears through the city, throwing it into complete chaos and terrorizing everyone living there. Immediately, it becomes clear that they are not the work of an amateur, but of a calculating, efficient, and deadly mastermind.   </p><p><strong>Tick--Michael Bennett is on the chase</strong>  </p><p>The city calls on Detective Michael Bennett, pulling him away from a seaside retreat with his ten adopted children, his grandfather, and their beloved nanny, Mary Catherine. Not only does it tear apart their vacation, it leaves the entire family open to attack.<strong></strong>  </p><p><strong>Tock--your time is up</strong>  </p><p>Bennett enlists the help of a former colleague, FBI Agent Emily Parker. As his affection for Emily grows into something stronger, his relationship with Mary Catherine takes an unexpected turn. All too soon, another appalling crime leads Bennett to a shocking discovery that exposes the killer's pattern and the earth-shattering enormity of his plan. From the creator of the #1 New York detective series comes the most volatile and most explosive Michael Bennett novel ever. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>James Patterson has had more <em>New York Times</em> bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to <em>Guinness World Records</em>. Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977, James Patterson's books have sold more than 180 million copies. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels<strong>,</strong> the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including <em>Kiss the Girls </em>and <em>Along Came a Spider</em>. Mr. Patterson also writes the bestselling Women's Murder Club novels, set in San Francisco, and the top-selling New York detective series of all time, featuring Detective Michael Bennett. He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family.  </p><p>Michael Ledwidge is the author of _The Narrowback, Bad Connection, <em>and most recently,</em> <em>the coauthor, with James Patterson,</em> _of <em>The Quickie, Step on a Crack, Run For Your Life, </em>and <em>Worst Case.</em></p>


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<h3>Review</h3><p>“. . . Caine has known, befriended, worked or partied with everyone from John Huston to Heath Ledger, and has the kind of life where a Rolling Stone waits patiently while he gives James Bond advice on how to become a knight. As such, this breezy, name-droppy salute to old, un-PC Hollywood is a lighthearted hoot.” – New York Post</p><h3>Product Description</h3><p><strong>Charming, engaging, and surprisingly forthright, Michael Caine gives us his insider's view of Hollywood and the story of his brilliant second act</strong></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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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>The killer quill of Kitty Kelley, who skewered Jackie Onassis, Frank Sinatra, and Nancy Reagan, goes for royal blood in her latest tell-all biography, <em>The Royals</em>. Fans of the 1992 book Diana used to bash her in-laws--</p><p>Here are a few of the nasty allegations Kelley collects in a history of Britain's top dogs: though the royals may love their corgis more than their children and spouses, they pinch the poor pooches' posteriors to make them bark into the phone to amuse the royals at the other end of the line. Also, the Queen Mother may have been born out of wedlock, and her daughter, Queen Elizabeth, may have been conceived by artificial insemination.</p><p>There are dozens of other stinky zingers in Kelley's book, mostly from anonymous sources. The late Princess Diana comes off the best, even though Kelley suggests that she may have shoved her 58-year-old stepmother down the stairs. Diana met her last lover, Dodi, after <em>The Royals</em> went to press, so there's nothing in it about them--though Kelley does relate previous 100 m.p.h. chases and press encounters ending in gore. It was a long, sad story leading up to the last crash, and Kelley tells the family's worst enemies' account of it in a tone colder than the royals themselves. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Gossipmonger Kelly narrates her latest unauthorized biography, this time targeting Britain's royal family. She has included some interesting factual information about the royals, describing the early-20th-century history of the family and its ties to Germany. But the biography is a mix of fact and tawdry, unsubstantiated innuendo (Phillip may be bisexual, one son may not be his, etc.). Wherever possible, Kelley's inflections as narrator make events seem naughtier still. There are two obvious flaws: not once are sources cited clearly, and most of the slurs are based on what someone says without scrutiny of motives. Of the family, the Queen comes out of the fray best, and Charles definitely gets the worst of it. Throughout, schlock rules over scholarship. Not recommended.?Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, N.C.<br />Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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There is a box. Inside that box is a door. Beyond that door is a house.In some rooms forests grow. In some, prisoners wait.At the top of the house, a prisoner sits behind a locked door waiting for a key to turn. The day that happens, the world will end'刎ile under: Modern Fantasy [Worlds within Worlds | Prison Break | Exploring the Unknown | Dark Powers]


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>The incredible story of struggle, redemption, and bounty hunting--which has catapulted Duane "Dog" Chapman into the hearts of millions, sparked a #1 rated television show, and inspired a #1 <em>New York Times</em> bestselling book--continues in <em>Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given</em>. </p><p><em>"Who is going to give them the ride, Duane? Who will give them the cigarette and who will give them `the talk'?"</em></p><p>When the preacher posed those questions to me, I realized he was right. If not me, then who? Whether I had planned it or not, I was leading a backseat ministry, one ride at a time.<br />--from <em>Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given</em></p><p>Considered by many to be the world's greatest bounty hunter, Duane "Dog" Chapman has become famous for capturing fugitives on <em>Dog the Bounty Hunter</em>, his #1 rated show on A&amp;E. </p><p>But his job doesn't end when he cuffs his man--or woman. </p><p>Having personally struggled against abuse, addition, and a life of crime, Dog knows a thing or two about the path that these fugitives cuffed in the back of his car are on--and he has a good idea of the bad news they'll find at the end of it. As someone who has succeeded in beating the odds and finding a way to live on the right side of the law, Dog also knows what the person in the backseat needs to hear in order to straighten out his or her life. </p><p>"This is your wake up call. You either answer it now, or pay for it later and for the rest of your life. You're being given another shot at things, but only if you take the risk to make the right decision. The choice is yours. What's it going to be, brotha?" </p><p>While he is himself a mentor to many, Dog draws strength from the great teachers in his own life to face the surprising and difficult challenges that have come his way. Through hard work, unflinching faith, and the acknowledgment of his own flaws--along with the overwhelming desire to fix those flaws--Dog has been through the fire again and again, and come out the stronger for it. </p><p>Revealing, behind-the-scenes looks at Dog's most significant challenges, along with seat-of-your-pants accounts of his most breakneck bounty hunting stories, makes <em>Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given</em> a must-read for any fan. </p><h3>From the Author</h3><p><strong>Duane "Dog" Chapman</strong> is the famed bounty hunter featured on A&amp;E's <em>Dog the Bounty Hunter</em>. He is considered an expert on fugitive behavior and is called upon frequently by various news services for his opinion on breaking news stories involving crime. He lives with his wife, Beth, and children in Hawaii. </p><p><strong>Laura Morton</strong> has collaborated on over thirty books, including multiple <em>New York Times bestsellers</em>. She lives in New York City.</p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Chua (Day of Empire) imparts the secret behind the stereotypical Asian child's phenomenal success: the Chinese mother. Chua promotes what has traditionally worked very well in raising children: strict, Old World, uncompromising values--and the parents don't have to be Chinese. What they are, however, are different from what she sees as indulgent and permissive Western parents: stressing academic performance above all, never accepting a mediocre grade, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority. Chua and her Jewish husband (both are professors at Yale Law) raised two girls, and her account of their formative years achieving amazing success in school and music performance proves both a model and a cautionary tale. Sophia, the eldest, was dutiful and diligent, leapfrogging over her peers in academics and as a Suzuki piano student; Lulu was also gifted, but defiant, who excelled at the violin but eventually balked at her mother's pushing. Chua's efforts "not to raise a soft, entitled child" will strike American readers as a little scary--removing her children from school for extra practice, public shaming and insults, equating Western parenting with failure--but the results, she claims somewhat glibly in this frank, unapologetic report card, "were hard to quarrel with." (Jan.) <br>(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Chua’s stated intent is to present the differences between Western and Chinese parenting styles by sharing experiences with her own children (now teenagers). As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is poised to contrast the two disparate styles, even as she points out that being a “Chinese Mother” can cross ethnic lines: it is more a state of mind than a genetic trait. Yet this is a deeply personal story about her two daughters and how their lives are shaped by such demands as Chua’s relentless insistence on straight A’s and daily hours of mandatory music practice, even while vacationing with grandparents. Readers may be stunned by Chua’s explanations of her hard-line style, and her meant-to-be humorous depictions of screaming matches intended to force greatness from her girls. She insists that Western children are no happier than Chinese ones, and that her daughters are the envy of neighbors and friends, because of their poise and musical, athletic, and academic accomplishments. Ironically, this may be read as a cautionary tale that asks just what price should be paid for achievement. --Colleen Mondor </p>

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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, <em>Never Let Me Go</em>, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.</p><p>Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, __, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. <em>--Regina Marler</em></p><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Adult/High School–The elegance of Ishiguro's prose and the pitch-perfect voice of his narrator conspire to usher readers convincingly into the remembered world of Hailsham, a British boarding school for special students. The reminiscence is told from the point of view of Kathy H., now 31, whose evocation of the sheltered estate's sunlit rolling hills, guardians, dormitories, and sports pavilions is imbued with undercurrents of muted tension and foreboding that presage a darker reality. As an adult, Kathy re-engages in lapsed friendships with classmates Ruth and Tommy, examining the details of their shared youth and revisiting with growing awareness the clues and anecdotal evidence apparent to them even as youngsters that they were different from everyone outside. [...] Ishiguro conveys with exquisite sensitivity the emotional texture of the threesome's relationship, their bonds of personal loyalty that overcome fractures of trust, the palpable boundaries of hope, and the human capacity for forgiveness. Highly recommended for literary merit and as an exceptional platform for the discussion of a controversial topic._–Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA_ <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>

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<h3>From</h3><p>Ben Walsh is a man who has it all—money, good looks, and a great life in New York City. What he does not have is the deed to his parents’ home in Idaho. They died when he was young and his former home is important to him. His wily Grandpa Joe wants to see him wed, so he tells Ben to get married or he will sell the property. Ben’s plan is to get married, then divorced once he has the property. Gina Reyez is a self-made woman who hopes to one day own her own home to make sure that her family is secure after her extremely rough childhood. She avoids marriage and relationships like the plague. When Ben proposes to her and explains his reason for marriage, Gina accepts because she believes that he is gay and will not impose on her family life. But she has yet to meet Grandpa Joe. Charming readers with her wit and style, Kaye creates an extremely sensual romance about two people who do not believe in romantic love. --Patty Engelmann </p><h3>Review</h3><p>Charming readers with her wit and style, Kaye creates an extremely sensual romance about two people who do not believe in romantic love.<br />(Patty Engelmann <em>Booklist</em> 20101217)  </p><p>Entertaining and cute... Super sizzling... (_Dreamworld Book Reviews_ 20110103)  </p><p>Wildly entertaining and comical from the start... The love scenes are hot and sexy and the chemistry between Ben and Gina sizzles! (_RT Book Reviews_ 20110103)  </p><p>The writing is fantastic, the characters are wonderfully developed, and the conflicts that exist between the two are very real. (_The Long and Short of It Reviews_ 20110107)  </p><p><em>Yours for the Taking</em> is a treat to read, and a sweet, funny way to start the New Year. (_The Barnes and Noble Review_ 20110107)  </p><p><em>Yours for the Taking</em> is so well written, I found myself thinking about it and smiling long after I was finished. A Night Owl Romance Top Pick! (_Night Owl Romance_ 20110110)  </p><p>Sweet, sexy, and smoking' hot! (_Dark Diva Reviews_ 20110110)  </p><p>Light, funny, and romantic. (_Smexy Books_ 20110113)  </p><p>With characters like an interfering elder statesman and a bunch of strapping singles waiting for their own books, this sexy contemporary will satisfy Kaye's readers and enlist a whole passel of new ones. (Bette-Lee Fox <em>Library Journal</em> 20110117)  </p><p>Robin Kaye keeps readers on their toes with twists and turns in this romantic adventure sprinkled with bits of humor in all the right places. (_Thoughts in Progress_ 20110117)  </p><p>Sexy and entertaining... The romance was sweet and the passion was hot! (_Book Addict Patti_ 20110117)  </p><p>[Robin Kaye's] quirky humor, witty dialog, and gangling, bumbling characters will have readers glued to the pages to the very end. (_Author Kelly Moran's Blog_ 20110118)  </p><p>A sweet, dramatic and passionate romance. (_Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell_ )  </p><p>Robin Kaye has yet again WOWED me with her writing.... funny, emotional and delivers great character development. (_Cindy Read Romance_ )  </p><p>A fun, entertaining, witty ride of a book... Perfect! (_I Loves to Read_ ) </p>


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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>“Exceptional culinary detail and page-singeing sexual chemistry combine with a fascinating group of characters to produce a sophisticated modern romance that ties into the current foodie craze. This debut—first in a projected "Recipe for Love" series—will win over most contemporary romance fans.—_Library Journal_</p><p>“In her wickedly entertaining debut, Edwards dishes up a captivating contemporary romance expertly seasoned with plenty of sizzling sexual chemistry and deliciously tart humor.” –_Booklist_</p><p>“The simmering chemistry comes to a boil in this deliciously sensual and delightfully amusing debut.”  --_Orlando__ Sentinel_</p><p>“This playful culinary confection is a lighthearted and entertaining romance that will delight readers. With all the behind the scenes revelations, you’ll never look at cooking and meal preparation in the same way again. Steamy and satisfying fare, indeed” –_Fresh Fiction_</p><p>__ </p><p><em>“</em>From start to finish, I devoured and enjoyed every moment of this book. Miranda and Adam worked well together like…honey and cayenne pepper…a little sweet and a little spicy with an end result to make you say “Wow”.” –_Cheryl’s Book Nook_</p><p>__ </p><p>“I LOVED <em>Can’t Stand The Heat</em> . Louisa Edwards has written a great debut novel, and I look forward to reading more of the Recipe for Love series.” –_Beautiful Reads_</p><p>__ </p><p>“The strength of this novel is substantial…. The writing, the other characters, the setting, the nuances, and the imagery are marvelous….Food and its various meanings and permutations are a fluid and discernible part of the writing in this book. It includes themes of home, heart, family, and nourishment, what people need to survive, and how the food we eat can communicate more than words can provide.” –_Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels_</p><p>__ </p><p>“A deliciously fun read. The plot and eccentric characters are well written, and the kitchen sizzles with hot passion.” –_Romance Reviews Today_</p><p><em> </em></p><p>“_Can’t Stand the Heat_ is a delightful blend of chemistry, competition, and cooking, and it was just what I was looking for. I loved the fast-paced scenes that make you feel the controlled chaos of a restaurant during dinner hour, as well as the slower-paced scenes such as Adam teaching Miranda how to cook…I’m am eagerly awaiting Edwards’ next release in the series. Here’s hoping it’s as good a read as this terrific debut.” –_All About Romance___</p><p>“Snappy, exciting, adventurous, and totally unexpected. <em>Can't Stand the Heat</em>... is one of the best light-hearted culinary, romantic novels this reviewer has read in a very long time! Grand job, Louisa Edwards.” –_Crystal__ Reviews_</p><p>“_Can’t Stand the Heat_ is the first novel in her “Recipe for Love” series, and what a start it is. All of the characters are portrayed in such a revealing light that you will remember them for quite some time. I love the sensuality as well as the conflict. I have become a fan of this author and cannot wait to read more in her series, along with any other works she comes out with!” –_Coffee Time Romance_ (5 Stars)</p><p>“Make sure that you have a good lazy day to spend with <em>Can’t Stand The Heat</em>, and don’t start reading this one in the evening, or I guarantee you will be up all night!”  --_The Romance Reader_   </p><p>“The author blends love and recipes into a fun romp…Fans will enjoy the pizzazz and flavor that Louisa Edwards brings to her warm tale.” –_Genre Go Round Reviews_</p><p>“A funny, lovable story about two unlikely people falling for each other. The plot, characters, and setting comes together to form a wonderful, light-hearted, culinary romance that is a blast to read and I can't wait for the next “Recipe for Love” novel!” –_The Book Lush_</p><p>“Delish! Creative debut author Louisa Edwards will have you eating out of her hand as you read her witty, insightful, foodie romance…_ Can’t Stand the Heat_ is filled with steamy passion, realistically described settings, a distinctive plot and characters that beg for their own stories.  Watch for more to come from this talented new author.”  --_SingleTitles.com_</p><p><em> </em></p><p>“Mmmm... Louisa Edwards' debut effort--_Can't Stand the Heat_--is <em>yummy</em>!! The witty repartee between Miranda and Adam, the snappy dialog between Adam and his staff, make this a fun, sizzling, read… And all the food talk in between these covers? Make sure you're not reading while hungry.” –_Drey’s Library_</p><p>“The main characters to felt like friends and the secondary romance involving Miranda's brother helped keep things moving. One of the best parts was discovering an excerpt of Edwards's next book featuring a minor character from this one--giving me another book to look forward to…Can't Stand the Heat? I say, get into this kitchen!”  -- <em>PublishersWeekly.com</em></p><p>“ An exquisitely prepared romance seasoned with scorching hot love scenes, <em>Can’t Stand the Heat</em> is truly an unforgettable dish. You can’t miss this delectable and mouthwatering debut!” –_New York Times_ bestsellilng author Kresley Cole</p><p>"Smokin' hot chefs, sizzling passion, and a big dash of charm--no reservations required for this smart, stylish romance!"---_New York Times_ bestselling author Gena Showalter</p><p>“_Can’t Stand the Heat_ is HOT in the kitchen and everywhere else!” – <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author Carly Phillips</p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>For sharp-tongued food critic Miranda Wake, the chance to spend a month in Adam Temple’s kitchen to write an exposé is a journalistic dream come true. Surely Miranda can find a way to cut the hotshot chef down to size once she learns what _really <em>goes on at his trendy Manhattan restaurant. But she never expected Adam to find out her most embarrassing secret: she has no idea how to cook.</em>_</p><p>Adam’s not about to have his reputation burned by a critic who doesn’t even know the difference between poaching and paring.  He’ll just have to give the tempting redhead a few private lessons of his own—teaching her what it means to cook with passion…and doing more with his hands than simply preparing sumptuous food.</p>

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<div><h3>From</h3><p><em>Starred Review</em> Firing his New York publicist is the first thing Devon Sparks has done in a long time that feels right. The second thing is flirting outrageously with a gorgeous stranger, who politely reprimands Devon for splashing his drink all over her back. Unlike the hordes of females who are more than happy to keep celebrity chef Devon and his money company, tart-tongued, sweetly southern Lilah Jane Tunkle has no idea of the extent of Devon’s fame and wealth. One night of no-strings, no-regrets sex with Lilah is all Devon wants, and that is exactly what Devon believes he has enjoyed until he arrives at work the next day and discovers that one of his new employees is none other than Lilah. In her second hot and spicy culinary romance, following Can’t Stand the Heat (2009)—which stars food critic Miranda Wake and chef Adam Temple—Edwards cooks up the perfect combination of compelling characters and an intriguing plot that delivers a marvelous confection of irresistible details about the fascinating world inside the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant. --John Charles </p><h3>Review</h3><p><strong>Praise for ON THE STEAMY SIDE</strong></p><p>“Edwards cooks up the perfect combination of compelling characters and an intriguing plot that delivers a marvelous confection of irresistible details about the fascinating world inside the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant.”—_Booklist _(Starred Review)</p><p>”_On the Steamy Side_ is an instant re-read, a fresh, emotions-first take on the food-infused romance and, quite simply, a stellar example of the health and vibrancy of the American contemporary romance.  I’m betting it ends up on any number of Best of 2010 lists.” --_ _Michelle Buonfiglio, Barnes &amp; Noble’s <em>Heart to Heart</em></p><p>“A delight from cover to cover…My favorite aspect is how skillfully Ms. Edwards weaves emotional subjects throughout the novel…_On the Steamy Side_ is much more than a sexy romance. It [has] depth and humanity. This series is headed for my keeper shelves. “ –_A Romance Review_</p><p>“The snappy, fun loving dialogue and overall comradery with this cast of character makes for great reading.” –_Babbling About Books_</p><p>“Steam up your reading with <em>On The Steamy Side</em> by mega-talented Louisa Edwards.”—SingleTitles.com<strong></strong></p><p>“Fast paced and scintillating…Boiling and searing love scenes aside, the complex relationships and self-discovery shared with the unique backdrop of the cut-throat and competitive culinary arts forces the reader to consume page after page as voraciously as the chefs can dish it up.”  --_Romance Readers Choice_ <strong></strong></p><p>“Louisa Edwards’ fast-paced, sparkling <em>On The Steamy Side</em> has sizzling sex scenes, complicated relationships, and unique settings, with an undercurrent of humor.” –_Long and Short Reviews_</p><p>“If you need a real feel-good, make your heart sing, and your body tingle kind of afternoon this is the perfect recipe for success” –_Coffee Time Romance_</p><p><strong>Praise for CAN’T STAND THE HEAT</strong></p><p><strong>“</strong>Exceptional culinary detail and page-singeing sexual chemistry combine with a fascinating group of characters to produce a sophisticated modern romance that ties into the current foodie craze. This debut—first in a projected "Recipe for Love" series—will win over most contemporary romance fans.—_Library Journal_</p><p>“The simmering chemistry comes to a boil in this deliciously sensual and delightfully amusing debut.”  --_Orlando__ Sentinel_</p><p>__ </p><p>“When I tried to figure out why I liked the book so much, two things came to mind. One, when it was over I didn’t really feel like I had read a book; I felt as if I’d been a part of the story. That’s very difficult to achieve.  Two, I realized what Edwards’ style reminded me of…Several times reading this one I thought to myself, <em>‘This woman could be the next Susan Elizabeth Phillips.’ </em>And I don’t write that lightly.” –ColumbusDispatch.com</p><p>“This playful culinary confection is a lighthearted and entertaining romance that will delight readers. With all the behind the scenes revelations, you’ll never look at cooking and meal preparation in the same way again. Steamy and satisfying fare, indeed” –_Fresh Fiction_</p><p><em>“</em>From start to finish, I devoured and enjoyed every moment of this book. Miranda and Adam worked well together like…honey and cayenne pepper…a little sweet and a little spicy with an end result to make you say “Wow”.” –_Cheryl’s Book Nook_</p><p>“I LOVED <em>Can’t Stand The Heat</em> . Louisa Edwards has written a great debut novel, and I look forward to reading more of the Recipe for Love series.” –_Beautiful Reads_</p><p>“The strength of this novel is substantial…. The writing, the other characters, the setting, the nuances, and the imagery are marvelous….Food and its various meanings and permutations are a fluid and discernible part of the writing in this book. It includes themes of home, heart, family, and nourishment, what people need to survive, and how the food we eat can communicate more than words can provide.” –_Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels_</p><p>“A deliciously fun read. The plot and eccentric characters are well written, and the kitchen sizzles with hot passion.” –_Romance Reviews Today_</p><p>__ </p><p>“Sophisticated, romantic, mouth watering and sizzling hot.” –The Three Tomatoes Book Reviews</p><p>__ </p><p>__ </p><p><strong>“</strong><em>Can’t Stand the Heat</em> is a delightful blend of chemistry, competition, and cooking, and it was just what I was looking for. I loved the fast-paced scenes that make you feel the controlled chaos of a restaurant during dinner hour, as well as the slower-paced scenes such as Adam teaching Miranda how to cook…I’m am eagerly awaiting Edwards’ next release in the series. Here’s hoping it’s as good a read as this terrific debut.” –_All About Romance_<strong>__</strong></p><hr><p>“Snappy, exciting, adventurous, and totally unexpected. <em>Can't Stand the Heat</em>... is one of the best light-hearted culinary, romantic novels this reviewer has read in a very long time! Grand job, Louisa Edwards.” <strong>–_Crystal__ Reviews_</strong></p><hr><p>“_Can’t Stand the Heat_ is the first novel in her “Recipe for Love” series, and what a start it is. All of the characters are portrayed in such a revealing light that you will remember them for quite some time. I love the sensuality as well as the conflict. I have become a fan of this author and cannot wait to read more in her series, along with any other works she comes out with!” –_Coffee Time Romance_ (5 Stars)</p><p>“Make sure that you have a good lazy day to spend with <em>Can’t Stand The Heat</em>, and don’t start reading this one in the evening, or I guarantee you will be up all night!”  --_The Romance Reader_   <strong></strong></p><hr><p>“The author blends love and recipes into a fun romp…Fans will enjoy the pizzazz and flavor that Louisa Edwards brings to her warm tale.” –_Genre Go Round Reviews_<strong></strong></p><hr><p>“A funny, lovable story about two unlikely people falling for each other. The plot, characters, and setting comes together to form a wonderful, light-hearted, culinary romance that is a blast to read and I can't wait for the next “Recipe for Love” novel!” –_The Book Lush_</p><p>“Delish! Creative debut author Louisa Edwards will have you eating out of her hand as you read her witty, insightful, foodie romance…_ Can’t Stand the Heat_ is filled with steamy passion, realistically described settings, a distinctive plot and characters that beg for their own stories.  Watch for more to come from this talented new author.”  --_SingleTitles.com_</p><p>__ </p><p>“Mmmm... Louisa Edwards' debut effort--_Can't Stand the Heat_--is <em>yummy</em>!! The witty repartee between Miranda and Adam, the snappy dialog between Adam and his staff, make this a fun, sizzling, read… And all the food talk in between these covers? Make sure you're not reading while hungry.” –_Drey’s Library_<strong></strong></p><hr><p>“The main characters to felt like friends and the secondary romance involving Miranda's brother helped keep things moving. One of the best parts was discovering an excerpt<br>of Edwards's next book featuring a minor character from this one--giving me another book to look forward to…Can't Stand the Heat? I say, get into this kitchen!”  -- <em>PublishersWeekly.com</em></p><p>__ </p><p>“Louisa Edwards has cooked up a sassy and sexy contemporary romance. With the popularity of the Food Network so high these days, this novel has arrived just in time to delight foodies and readers both. The food descriptions alone in this book are enough to set your mouth watering…I predict a delicious future for this new writer” –_Review Journal_</p><p>__ </p><p>“Ms. Louisa Edwards is definitely an author to watch!  Her descriptions make you feel like you can almost smell the food Adam’s cooking!  CAN’T STAND THE HEAT has what it takes to affect all of your emotions--joy, sorrow, fear, hate, and love.” –The Romance Readers Connection</p><p>“ An exquisitely prepared romance seasoned with scorching hot love scenes, <em>Can’t Stand the Heat</em> is truly an unforgettable dish. You can’t miss this delectable and mouthwatering debut!” –_New York Times_ bestsellilng author Kresley Cole</p><p>"Smokin' hot chefs, sizzling passion, and a big dash of charm--no reservations required for this smart, stylish romance!"---_New York Times_ bestselling author Gena Showalter</p><p>“_Can’t Stand the Heat_ is HOT in the kitchen and everywhere else!” – <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author Carly Phillips</p>

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<h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Chandler is not only the best writer of hardboiled PI stories, he's one of the 20th century's top scribes, period. His full canon of novels and short stories is reprinted in trade paper featuring uniform covers in Black Lizard's signature style. A handsome set for a reasonable price. <br />Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Raymond Chandler is a master." --_The New York Times_<br />_<br /><em>?[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.? --</em>The New Yorker  </p><p><em>?Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.? --Robert B. Parker, </em>The New York Times Book Review  </p><p><em>?Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.? --</em>Los Angeles Times<br />_<br />?Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.? ?_The Boston Book Review<br />_<br />?Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler?s prose. . . . He wrote like an angel.? --_Literary Review<br />_<br />?[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision.? --Joyce Carol Oates, _The New York Review of Books  </p><p>_?Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.? ?Ross Macdonald<br />_<br />_?Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude.? --Erle Stanley Gardner<br />_<br />_?Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.? --Paul Auster   </p><p>?[Chandler]?s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that?s like ours, but isn?t. ? --Carolyn See<br />_<br />_ -- <em>Review</em></p>


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This book addresses one of the most urgent questions in American society today, one that is currently in the spotlight and hotly debated on all sides: Who shall rule the schools--parents or educators?  School Choice or Best Systems: What Improves Education? presents an overview of research and practical applications of innovative--even radical--school reforms being implemented across the United States. These fall along a continuum ranging from "parental choice" to "best systems." At the one extreme are schools of choice, which allow parents to choose and even govern schools for their children. These include charter schools, traditional private and parochial schools, schools that are privately governed but publicly funded through vouchers, and those that are funded by private scholarships provided by both corporations and wealthy individuals. At the other extreme are centralized state or district systems, based on reform initiatives and new systems of education that have been developed in response to views of citizens and legislators that schools can do much better. These schools, which specify uniform goals, policies, and programs for each school, are highly innovative systems based on research or representing advanced thinking about "what works," and have attracted wide interest.  Important questions related to schools of choice and best systems are addressed: How can we choose among schools of choice and best systems? Among the various approaches within each of these alternatives? How can we understand their guiding principles and operational practices? What results do they produce? How can we evaluate their claims? In choosing among the alternatives, how should issues of student achievement, accountability, costs, feasibility, and equity be factored in?  This volume brings together leading researchers and education leaders who have carried out the latest studies and advances in the field, providing a forum for them to set forth the arguments and evidence that will be most helpful in making choices for tomorrow's schools. It does not provide a single "right" answer--values and preferences differ across parents, schools, districts, and states. However, there are benefits for all from seeing the rigorous research, challenging thinking, and alternate points of view this volume presents.


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Tooley (_Reclaiming Education_) documents his surprising finding that private schools are providing quality education to millions of poor children in the developing world. Whereas development experts insist that the path out of poverty lies in investment in public schools, the author draws on his fieldwork in India, China and Africa to argue that small entrepreneurs are educating the poor. In one region of India, 80% of urban children and 30% of rural children attend private schools; in China's Gansu province 586 private schools are located in small villages, even though the state prides itself on its public system. Contrary to accepted wisdom, the modest fees of private schools are within reach of most, and parents find them superior to public schools that are often riddled with corruption and incompetence. Tooley argues that development funds be invested to support these institutions, through vouchers to parents and microfinance loans to the schools. The author's engaging style transforms what could have been a dry if startling research report into a moving account of how poor parents struggle against great odds to provide a rich educational experience to their children. <em>(Apr.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Everyone from Bono to the United Nations is looking for a miracle to bring schooling within reach of the poorest children on Earth. James Tooley found one hiding in plain sight. While researching private schools in India for the World Bank, and worried he was doing little to help the poor, Tooley wandered into the slums of Hyderabad's Old City. Shocked to find it overflowing with tiny, parentfunded schools filled with energized students, he set out to discover if schools like these could help achieve universal education. Named after Mahatma Gandhi's phrase for the schools of pre-colonial India, The Beautiful Tree recounts Tooley's journey from the largest shanty town in Africa to the hinterlands of Gansu, China. It introduces readers to the families and teachers who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and educating themselves. </p>

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<div><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Chandler is not only the best writer of hardboiled PI stories, he's one of the 20th century's top scribes, period. His full canon of novels and short stories is reprinted in trade paper featuring uniform covers in Black Lizard's signature style. A handsome set for a reasonable price. <br>Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Raymond Chandler is a master." --_The New York Times_<br>_<br><em>?[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.? --</em>The New Yorker  </p><p><em>?Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.? --Robert B. Parker, </em>The New York Times Book Review  </p><p><em>?Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.? --</em>Los Angeles Times<br>_<br>?Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.? ?_The Boston Book Review<br>_<br>?Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler?s prose. . . . He wrote like an angel.? --_Literary Review<br>_<br>?[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision.? --Joyce Carol Oates, _The New York Review of Books  </p><p>_?Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.? ?Ross Macdonald<br>_<br>_?Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude.? --Erle Stanley Gardner<br>_<br>_?Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.? --Paul Auster   </p><p>?[Chandler]?s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that?s like ours, but isn?t. ? --Carolyn See<br>_<br>_ -- <em>Review</em></p>

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<div><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>YA. This story of friendship and betrayal is set in Washington, DC, where four young men who have grown up together become housemates, each with his first big job opportunity. One of them, Ben Addison, is a brand-new clerk for a Supreme Court justice. Ben and his co-clerk Lisa are two of the best and the brightest of the legal community, their intelligence only barely exceeding their egos. But early in the Court session, he is tricked into revealing the confidential outcome of an upcoming decision to a man posing as a former clerk, and one of the parties in the case uses the information to make millions. Ben is in danger of losing his job, his reputation, and any chance for a place on the ladder to legal fame and success. Desperate to find the man who tricked him, he enlists the help of Lisa and his housemates. When the elusive villain tries to blackmail Ben into revealing further Court decisions, the search becomes even more intense, and Ben realizes that one of his friends is leaking the group's plans to the blackmailer. The story builds to an action-packed and satisfying conclusion, but lives are shattered in the process and the fabric of friendship is torn apart. YAs will be confronted by issues of loyalty, integrity, and trust, and at the same time will learn much about the decision-making process of the Supreme Court.?Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA<br>Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Hotshot young lawyer Ben Addison is on top of the world. Just out of Yale Law School, he's already landed the highly desirable top job of clerk to a Supreme Court justice, experiences instant chemistry with his new co-clerk Lisa, and shares an apartment with three lifelong friends. Then a misplaced trust leads Ben to reveal a confidential court decision, and his world begins to crash. With Ben's career in jeopardy and a blackmailer on his trail, his friends use their job connections at the State Department, a Washington newspaper, and a senator's office to aid Ben and Lisa in a plot to apprehend Ben's blackmailer. But when their own careers are threatened, allegiance fades and distrust sets in, turning Ben and his former allies against one another as events escalate and they find themselves struggling not to save their careers but their lives. The story flows smoothly in this engrossing legal thriller by lawyer Meltzer?and the plot is perfect for a blockbuster movie. A good purchase.?Lori Dunn, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Troy, N.C.<br>Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

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Mornings in Jeninis a multi-generational story about a Palestinian family. Forcibly removed from the olive-farming village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejos are displaced to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. We follow the Abulhejo family as they live through a half century of violent history. Amidst the loss and fear, hatred and pain, as their tents are replaced by more forebodingly permanent cinderblock huts, there is always the waiting, waiting to return to a lost home. The novel's voice is that of Amal, the granddaughter of the old village patriarch, a bright, sensitive girl who makes it out of the camps, only to return years later, to marry and bear a child. Through her eyes, with her evolving vision, we get the story of her brothers, one who is kidnapped to be raised Jewish, one who will end with bombs strapped to his middle. But of the many interwoven stories, stretching backward and forward in time, none is more important than Amal's own. Her story is one of love and loss, of childhood and marriage and parenthood, and finally the need to share her history with her daughter, to preserve the greatest love she has. Set against one of the twentieth century's most intractable political conflicts, Mornings in Jenin is a deeply human novel - a novel of history, identity, friendship, love, terrorism, surrender, courage, and hope. Its power forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining conflicts of our lifetimes.


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Bestseller Green's latest overstuffed entry in his Deathstalker epic (after 2003's Deathstalker Legacy) tests our heroes to the limit as they seek the supposedly dead Owen Deathstalker, for they believe that only he can turn back the oncoming Terror, an evil and unstoppable force bent on destroying all the worlds in its path. Lewis Deathstalker, descendant of the Beloved Owen, on the lam with his renegade companions, runs into adventure after adventure as he seeks Owen on a variety of planets. Their archenemy, former Paragon Finn Durandal, dogs them every step of the way as he seizes power, overthrows King Douglas and dismantles the Golden Age that Owen helped create 200 years earlier. Others seek to overthrow the nasty Durandal, including the enigmatic robots of Shub, Douglas (who's not the broken man he appears to be), Paragon Emma Steel and Steel's unlikely ally, gun-toting girl reporter Nina Malapert. Green ably juggles elements of sword and sorcery, high fantasy, humorous quest and SF, with homages to authors such as Moorcock, Adams, Cordwainer Smith and Zelazny. Amazing coincidences, or the sudden appearance of powerful, supposedly long-dead heroes who give advice, save the day a few too many times, blunting the impact of the characters' actions, but it's a fun, twisty romp with surprises around every corner. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Lewis Deathstalker's troubles are many, even if he is with the woman he loves, Jessamine Flowers. The problem is that she was King Douglas' intended, and that makes Deathstalker a traitor. It is Finn Durandal, nominally a Douglas ally, who is actually hatching the highest treason, and whom Douglas and Deathstalker (the Killer Ds) really have to worry about. Deathstalker's cohorts continue to be a charming con man, an immortal female gladiator, and a reptiloid named Saturday. They and Lewis constitute a tough bunch, but what will happen should Lewis' ancestor Owen Deathstalker, thought to have been dead for two centuries, return? But then, is there anything dire enough to necessitate his return? Tune in on the next Deathstalker volume for answers to those questions, but meanwhile have fun with this one. After all, reading even one Deathstalker leaves one feeling jollier than before, for the series continues to avoid the lapses of tone so common in humorous space opera and fantasy. <em>Roland Green</em><br><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p>

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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Bestseller Green, author of the Deathstalker series (Deathstalker War, etc.), which concluded with Owen Deathstalker and his ragtag comrades defeating the evil Empress Lionstone, presents a swashbuckling sequel, in which Owen's descendant Lewis is dragged unwillingly into emulating his ancestor's desperate heroism. Lewis just wants to be a good Paragon (a kind of high-tech supercop/knight) and faithfully serve his best friend, King Douglas. Unfortunately, Lewis and the king's intended bride fall hopelessly in love. Even more unfortunately, as if there weren't enough monstrously subversive groups plotting against the throne from outside the court, Lewis's jealous rival, Finn, who has a perfect Paragon's surface but a brilliant sociopath's soul, succeeds in discrediting Lewis and throwing the government into disarray. And then the planet-scouring Terror erupts from another dimension. As is in a lot of space opera, the plot doesn't withstand close scrutiny, but this hardly matters as the narrative rushes from one dramatic set piece to the next. If the characterization seems just a shade above comic-book complexity, Green uses echoes of the somber King Arthur legend to lend extra weight. At the end, when Lewis sets off on his heroic quest to locate the original Deathstalker, accompanied by an outrageously diverse band of cohorts, the prospect of another long series of long novels actually sounds like fun.<br>Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From</h3><p>This stout, exuberant piece of intelligent space opera continues the saga of those elite warriors and masters of interstellar intrigue and violence, the Deathstalkers, one of whom, Douglas Campbell, is about to take the throne of the empire, which is at the height of its power, prosperity, and benignity. Campbell has even been assigned a bride, the gorgeous opera singer Jesamine Flowers. But terrorism looms even before the royal wedding and, after it, crashes the party on a truly ghastly scale, triggering some 400 pages of non-stop, slightly tongue-in-cheek action. There are plots, counterplots, subplots, and characters getting plotzed on "Death by Chocolate" ice cream as well as much undercover action, the covers for which are quite varied. In the end, Lewis Deathstalker leads a motley starship crew off to . . . the sequel, of which this book bodes well. Great fun if you don't take it too seriously. <em>Roland Green</em><br><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p>

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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>“An incredible romp through a wonderful universe of space opera.”<br>—_SF Site_</p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Owen Deathstalker's greatest love--Hazel d'Ark--has been abducted by a cult dedicated to the excesses of scientific experimentation. Stranded on Lachrymae Christi, Owen struggles to help a leper colony survive, waiting for his chance to rescue Hazel. But Humanity is once again in the throes of intergalactic war...  </p><p>Will Owen surrender to the battle cry? Or forsake his own destiny...for the woman he loves?  </p><p>"Green blends derring-do, space battles, and wry banter aplenty to form an eminently satisfying space opera." --_Booklist_  </p><ul><li>     Simon R. Green is the <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author of <em>Blue Moon</em>, <em>Shadows Fall</em>, and thirteen other novels   </li> <li>     <em>Deathstalker Destiny</em> is the fifth novel in a big intergalactic adventure in the tradition of <em>Star Wars</em> </li></ul></div>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>At the outset of Dean's solid historical, the highly arranged life of the 17-year-old prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, takes a drastic turn. One day in May 1911 while speeding in his motorcar, the prince, known as David, hits a young woman, Rose Houghton, riding on her bicycle near her home, Snowberry Manor. He rushes Rose to the manor house, where he falls almost instantly in love with her youngest sister, Lily. David spends much time at Snowberry, where he can pretend to be an ordinary man. He proposes to Lily, but his father, George V, refuses to allow the marriage. When David threatens to abdicate his right to the throne, Lily must choose between her own well-being and that of England. Besides creating a complicated lead in the prince, Dean (Palace Circle) deftly balances an array of well-drawn characters. Only the cartoonish villain, Captain Cullen, rings false. (Dec.) <br>(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"With her insight into the era, Dean brilliantly depicts the man and England so well that readers will believe they are part of the whirlwind that was 1911 England. Through her elegant prose and vibrant descriptions, that world comes to life." --_The Romantic Times<br>_  </p><p>"Well researched and well written, this is romantic historical fiction at its best. " --_Library Journal_</p>

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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>“An emotionally charged and suspense-filled tale . . . with enough surprises, twists and turns to keep you guessing.”—_Romance Reviews Today<br>_<br>“Wild magic and wilder sex.”—_Publishers Weekly<br>_<br>“Nearly nonstop action.”—_St. Louis Post-Dispatch  </p><p>_  </p><p><em>From the Paperback edition.</em></p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>I am Meredith, princess of faerie, wielder of the hands of Flesh and Blood, and at long last, I am with child–twins, fathered by my royal guard. Though my uncle, Taranis, King of Light and Illusion, claims that he is the true father since he abducted me from my home, betrayed, and defiled me. And now he has branded my guards as a threat to my unborn children.  </p><p>Bearing an heir has placed me halfway to my aunt’s throne, that much closer to my reign over the Unseelie Court–and well ahead of her son, my cousin Cel, in this race. Now I must stay alive to see my children born and claim my place as queen.  </p><p>But not all in faerie are pleased with the news, and conspirators from every court in the realm plot against me and mine. They seek to strip my guards, my lovers, from me by poisoned word or cold steel. But I still have supporters, and even friends, among the goblins and the sluagh, who will stand by me.  </p><p>I am Meredith Nic Essus, and those who would defy and destroy me are destined to pay a terrible price–for I am truly my father’s daughter. To protect what is mine, I will sacrifice anything–even if it means waging a great battle against my darkest enemies and making the most momentous decision ever made as princess of faerie.  </p><p>_<br>_</p>

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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>My name is Meghan Chase.</p><p>I thought it was over. That my time with the fey, the impossible choices I had to make, the sacrifices of those I loved, was behind me. But a storm is approaching, an army of Iron fey that will drag me back, kicking and screaming. Drag me away from the banished prince who's sworn to stand by my side. Drag me into the core of conflict so powerful, I'm not sure anyone can survive it.</p><p>This time, there will be no turning back. </p><h3>Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.</h3><p>Eleven years ago, on my sixth birthday, my father disappeared.</p><p>One year ago, on the very same day, my brother was taken from me, as well. But that time, I went into Faery to take him back.</p><p>It's strange how a journey can change you, what you can learn from it. I learned that the man I thought was my father wasn't my father at all. That my biological dad wasn't even human. That I was the half-breed daughter of a legendary faery king, and his blood flowed in my veins. I learned that I had power, a power that scares me, even now. A power that even the fey dread, something that can destroy them—and I'm not sure I can control it.</p><p>I learned that love can transcend race and time, and that it can be beautiful and perfect and worth fighting for but also fragile and heartbreaking, and sometimes sacrifice is necessary. That sometimes it's you against the world, and there are no easy answers. That you have to know when to hold on…and when to let go. And even if that love comes back, you could discover something in someone else who has been there all along.</p><p>I thought it was over. I thought my time with the fey, the impossible choices I had to make, the sacrifices for those I loved, was behind me. But a storm was approaching, one that would test those choices like never before. And this time, there would be no turning back.</p><p>My name is Meghan Chase.</p><p>In less than twenty-four hours, I'll be seventeen.</p><p>Déjà vu, right? Shocking how quickly time can pass you by, like you're standing still. I can't believe it's been a year since that day. The day I went into Faery. The day that changed my life forever.</p><p>Technically, I won't actually be turning seventeen. I've been in the Nevernever too long. When you're in Faery, you don't age, or you age so slowly it's not worth mentioning. So, while a year has passed in the real world, I'm probably only a few days older than when I went in.</p><p>In real life, I've changed so much I don't even recognize myself.</p><p>Beneath me, the tatter-colt's hooves clopped against the pavement, a quiet rhythm that matched my own heartbeat. On this lonely stretch of Louisiana highway, surrounded by tupelo trees and moss-covered cypress, few cars passed us, and the ones that did flew by without slowing down, tossing leaves in their wake. They couldn't see the shaggy black horse with eyes like hot coals, walking along the road without reins or bit or saddle. They couldn't see the figures on its back, the pale-haired girl and the dark, beautiful prince behind her, his arms around her waist. Mortals were blind to the world of Faery, a world I was a part of now, whether I'd asked for it or not.</p><p>"What are you afraid of?" a deep voice murmured in my ear, sending a shiver up my spine. Even in the humid swamps of Louisiana, the Winter prince radiated cold, and his breath was wonderfully cool against my skin.</p><p>I peered at him over my shoulder. "What do you mean?"</p><p>Ash, prince of the Unseelie Court, met my gaze, silver eyes gleaming in the twilight. Officially, he was no longer a prince. Queen Mab had exiled him from the Nevernever after he refused to renounce his love for the half-human daughter of Oberon, the Summer King. My father. Summer and Winter were supposed to be enemies. We were not supposed to cooperate, we were not supposed to go on quests together and, most important, we were not supposed to fall in love.</p><p>But we had, and now Ash was here, with me. We were exiles, and the trods—the paths into Faery—were closed to us forever, but I didn't care. I wasn't planning to ever go back.</p><p>"You're nervous." Ash's hand stroked the back of my head, brushing the hair from my neck, making me shiver. "I can feel it. You have this anxious, flickering aura all around you, and it's driving me a little nuts, being this close. What's wrong?"</p><p>I should've known. There was no hiding what I felt from Ash, or any faery for that matter. Their magic, their glamour, came from human dreams and emotions. So Ash could sense what I was feeling without even trying. "Sorry," I told him. "I guess I am a little nervous."</p><p>"Why?"</p><p>"Why? I've been gone almost a year. Mom will hit the roof when she sees me." My stomach squirmed as I imagined the reunion: the tears, the angry relief, the inevitable questions. "They didn't hear anything from me while I was in Faery." I sighed, gazing up the road to where the stretch of pavement melted into the darkness. "What am I going to tell them? How will I even begin to explain?"</p><p>The tatter-colt snorted and pinned its ears at a truck that roared by, passing uncomfortably close. I couldn't be sure, but it looked like Luke's battered old Ford, rattling down the road and vanishing around a curve. If it was my stepdad, he definitely wouldn't have seen us; he'd had a hard time remembering my name even when I'd lived in the same house.</p><p>"You tell them the truth," Ash said, startling me. I wasn't expecting him to answer. "From the beginning. Either they accept it, or they don't, but you can't hide who you are, especially from your family. Best to get it over with—we can deal with whatever happens after."</p><p>His candor surprised me. I was still getting used to this new Ash, this faery who talked and smiled instead of hiding behind an icy wall of indifference. Ever since we were banished from the Nevernever, he'd been more open, less brooding and angst-ridden, as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. True, he was still quiet and solemn by anyone's standards, but for the first time, I felt I was finally getting a glimpse of the Ash I knew was there all along.</p><p>"But what if they <em>can't </em>deal with it?" I muttered, voicing the concern that had been plaguing me all morning. "What if they see what I am and freak out? What if they don't… want me anymore?"</p><p>I trailed off at the end, knowing I sounded like a sullen five-year-old. But Ash's hold on me tightened, and he pulled me closer against him.</p><p>"Then you'll be an orphan, just like me," he said. "And we'll find a way to get by." His lips brushed against my ear, tying my stomach into about a dozen knots. "Together."</p><p>My breath hitched, and I turned my head to kiss him, reaching back to run my hand through his silky dark hair.</p><p>The tatter-colt snorted and bucked midstep, not enough to throw me off, but enough to bounce me a few inches straight up. I snatched wildly for its mane as Ash grabbed my waist, keeping me from falling off. Heart pounding, I shot a glare between the tatter-colt's ears, resisting the urge to kick it in the ribs and give it another excuse to buck me off. It raised its head and glared back at us, eyes glowing crimson, disgust written plainly on its equine face.</p><p>I wrinkled my nose at it. "Oh, excuse me, are we making you uncomfortable?" I asked sarcastically, and it snorted. "Fine. We'll behave."</p><p>Ash chuckled but didn't attempt to pull me back. I sighed and gazed at the road over the colt's bobbing head, looking for familiar landmarks. My heart leaped when I saw a rusty van sitting in the trees off the side of the road, so ancient and corroded a tree had grown through the roof. It had been there for as long as I could remember, and I saw it every day on the bus to and from school. It always told me when I was nearly home.</p><p>It seemed so long ago, now—a lifetime ago—that I'd sat on the bus with my friend Robbie, when all I had to worry about was grades and homework and getting my driver's permit. So much had changed; it would feel strange returning to school and my old, mundane life like nothing had happened. "I'll probably have to repeat a year," I sighed, and felt Ash's puzzled gaze on my neck. Of course, being an immortal faery, he didn't have to worry about school and licenses and—</p><p>I stopped as reality seemed to descend on me all at once. My time in the Nevernever was like a dream, hazy and ethereal, but we were back in the real world now. Where I had to worry about homework and grades and getting into college. I'd wanted to get a summer job and save up for a car. I'd wanted to attend ITT Tech after high school, maybe move to the Baton Rouge or New Orleans campuses when I graduated. Could I still do that? Even after everything that happened? And where would a dark, exiled faery prince fit into all of this?</p><p>"What is it?" Ash's breath tickled the back of my ear, making me shiver.</p><p>I took a deep breath. "How is this going to work, Ash?" I half turned to face him. "Where will we be a year from now, two years from now? I can't stay here forever—sooner or later, I'm going to have to get on with my life. School, work, college someday…" I broke off and looked down at my hands. "I have to move on eventually, but I don't want to do any of those things without you."</p><p>"I've been thinking about that," Ash replied. I glanced up at him, and he surprised me with a brief smile. "You have your whole life ahead of you. It makes sense that you should plan for the future. And I figure, Goodfellow pretended to be mortal for sixteen years. There's no reason I can't do the same."</p><p>I blinked at him. "Really?"</p><p>He touched my cheek softly, his eyes intense as they gazed into mine. "You might have to teach me a little about the human world, but I'm willing to learn if it means being close to you." He smiled again, a wry quirk of his lips. "I'm sure I can adapt to 'being human,' if I must. If you want me to attend classes as a student, I can do that. If you want to move to a large city to pursue your dreams, I will follow. And if, someday, you wish to be married in a white gown and make this official in human eyes, I'm willing to do that, too." He leaned in, close enough for me to see my reflection in his silver gaze. "For better or worse, I'm afraid you're stuck with me now."</p><p>I felt breathless, not knowing what to say. I wanted to thank him, but those words didn't mean the same in faery terms. I wanted to lean in the rest of the way and kiss him, but the tatte... </p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Jean Auel's fifth novel about Ayla, the Cro-Magnon cavewoman raised by Neanderthals, is the biggest comeback bestseller in Amazon.com history. In <em>The Shelters of Stone</em>, Ayla meets the Zelandonii tribe of Jondalar, the Cro-Magnon hunk she rescued from Baby, her pet lion. Ayla is pregnant. How will Jondalar's mom react? Or his bitchy jilted fiancée? Ayla wows her future in-laws by striking fire from flint and taming a wild wolf. But most regard her Neanderthal adoptive Clan as subhuman "flatheads." Clan larynxes can't quite manage language, and Ayla must convince the Zelandonii that Clan sign language isn't just arm-flapping. Zelandonii and Clan are skirmishing, and those who interbreed are deemed "abominations." What would Jondalar's tribe think if they knew Ayla had to abandon her half-breed son in Clan country? The plot is slow to unfold, because Auel's first goal is to pack the tale with period Pleistocene detail, provocative speculation, and bits of romance, sex, tribal politics, soap opera, and homicidal wooly rhino-hunting adventure. It's an enveloping fact-based fantasy, a genre-crossing time trip to the Ice Age. <em>--Tim Appelo</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The tiny minority of authors with the power to sell millions of novels each time out are a diverse bunch, but they share a talent for ushering readers into previously closed worlds, whether they're the top-secret inner sanctums of the American military or the ancient lands of magic. The best of them craft terrific stories that tap into universal topics, primal fears and deep-seated longings. In 1980, Auel became a member of this elite club. Her first novel, Clan of the Cave Bear, the exceptional and absorbing account of a bright Cro-Magnon girl struggling to understand the ways of the Neanderthals who adopted her, became a huge bestseller and launched the Earth's Children series, which has sold 34 million copies to date. In the next three of an intended six volumes, Ayla the Cro-Magnon girl grew up and put a pretty face on our earliest ancestors, as Auel explored the mother of all human themes: adapt or die. After the fourth bestseller, The Plains of Passage, however, 12 years elapsed, and Auel thereby added the protracted anticipation of her fans to her bestselling mix. Here at last, beautiful Ayla and her tall, gorgeous Cro-Magnon lover, Jondalar, arrive in Jondalar's Zelandonii homeland, to live with his clan in vast caves of what today is France. Travelling with a pet wolf and two horses, able to speak the strange language of the "flatheads," Ayla is once again an exotic outsider. Pregnant with Jondalar's child and as zealous in her desire to help as she is resourceful and creative as a medicine woman, Ayla soon wins the respect of the people she wishes to join. Bursting with hard information about ancient days and awash in steamy sex (though lacking the high suspense that marked Ayla's debut), Auel's latest will not only please her legions of fans but will hit the top of the list, pronto. <br />Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The long-awaited fourth installment of the Earth's Children series is as warm and inviting as its campfire milieu. sure fire bestseller. Auel again describes her characters' travails, a passionate interest of millions of readers, in impeccably researched detail. The continuous recitation of flora and fauna, coupled with flashbacks to events in the previous books, becomes somewhat tiresome, however. (Would that our "memory" were as instinctual as that of the Clan.) The saga continues the cross-continental journey of Ayla, her mate Jondalar and their menagerie to his homeland. En route, they encounter a variety of problems, yet manage to find panaceas for each. Their enlightened compilation of skills, inventions, therapies and recipes transforms the voyagers into spirit-like personas providing The Others with constant awe. A brief encounter with the Neanderthal Clan rekindles the unique charm of the first (and strongest) book. Such locutions as "out of the cooking skin into the coals" or "Mother's path of milk" for the Milky Way are coyly anachronistic. Nonetheless, this volume is as welcome as letters from a long-lost friend. A novel 1.25 million first printing; major ad/promo; first serial to Ladies' Home Journal; BOMC main selection; author tour. <br>Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>YA-- Auel follows the successful formula of the other books in this series--man's emergence from primitivism to civilization. Ayla and Jondalar continue their journey, accompanied by Whinny, Racer, and Wolf, closely observing the terrain and prudently, even inventively, developing "modern" techniques to deal with danger and evil. Perhaps most interesting is Ayla's triumph over the matriarchal despot Attaroa; the reverberating echoes of the women's movement's attendant strengths and weaknesses lend a nice touch of irony. The love scenes are not quite as steamy as in the other books. The conclusion is too abrupt, coming just as the characters reach their destination, but The Plains of Passage is still satisfying.<br><em>- Joan L. Reynolds, West Potomac High School, Fairfax County, VA</em><br>Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

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This unforgettable odyssey into the distant past carries us back to the awesome mysteries of the exotic, primeval world of The Clan of the Cave Bear, and to Ayla, now grown into a beautiful and courageous young woman. Cruelly cast out by the new leader of the ancient Clan that adopted her as a child, Ayla leaves those she loves behind and travels alone through a stark, open land filled with dangerous animals but few people, searching for the Others, tall and fair like herself. The short summer gives her little time to look, and when she finds a sheltered valley with a herd of hardy steppe horses, she decides to stay and prepare for the long glacial winter ahead. Living with the Clan has taught Ayla many skills but not real hunting. She finally knows she can survive when she traps a horse, which gives her meat and a warm pelt for the winter, but fate has bestowed a greater gift, an orphaned foal with whom she develops a unique kinship. One winter extends to more; she discovers a way to make fire more quickly and a wounded cave lion cub joins her unusual family, but her beloved animals don’t fulfill her restless need for human companionship. Then she hears the sound of a man screaming in pain. She saves tall, handsome Jondalar, who brings her a language to speak and an awakening of love and desire, but Ayla is torn between her fear of leaving her valley and her hope of living with her own kind.


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>The greatest interviews with the greatest rock stars, movie stars, and cultural icons--uncensored and unfiltered--are published together in one remarkable volume in celebration of "Rolling Stones" 40th anniversary. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Jann Wenner is the founder, owner and editor of Rolling Stone magazine. He is also the head of Wenner Media, which includes such magazines as US Weekly and Men's Journal. He lives in Manhattan.   </p><p>Joe Levy is the Executive Editor of Rolling Stone. </p>


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<h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Grade 4-8–After 14 years as a slave girl in the village of River Away, Kale is free, because of a dragon's egg. Since she found it, the village elders have decided that she must present herself and the egg to the great wizards of the walled city of Vendela, where she expects to become a servant of Paladin, the earthly representative of Wulder, supreme being of Amara. Her journey is interrupted first by attacking ogres, then by a detour into a cave that hides seven more dragon eggs, and finally by a daring escape aided by dragon-riding rescuers who become Kale's guides, tutors, and closest cohorts on her travels. Two of her precious eggs hatch on the way and become her constant companions–first green Gymn, who heals, and then purple Metta, who sings. To them, Kale is much more than just a slave girl–she is the last of the great Allerion dragon-keepers. This is classic quest fantasy with echoes of J. R. R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy (Houghton) and of Christopher Paolini's <em>Eragon</em> (Knopf, 2003). As in C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books (HarperCollins), Christian allegories and messages are clearly presented and easily found, but it is equally possible to read this as Kale's story as it happened in Amara, a world completely separate from our own. It would be a shame to limit readership by relegating this clever and inventive story to the genre of Christian fiction. There is plenty of room for sequels, and readers will want to know much more about Kale and the remainder of her quest._–Susan L. Rogers, Chestnut Hill Academy, PA_ <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>In <em>Dragonspell</em>, Donita K. Paul has created an amazing world of fantasy adventure. From riding on dragons to jumping off cliffs to moving mountains, this story is sure to spark a reader's imagination young and old. And with a message of identity transformed from slavery to servanthood, it's a book families will love reading and discussing together.<br />Christopher P. N. Maselli, children's author of <em>Reality Shift</em> and founder of TruthPop.com  </p><p>A reluctant heroine, her fainting dragon, and an assortment of colorful companions make for a delightful read in Donita K. Paul's <em>Dragonspell</em>. This is adventure and fantasy at its finest a must read for the imaginative soul. <br />Linda Windsor, award-winning author of <em>Along Came Jones </em>and the <em>Fires of Gleannmara </em>trilogy  </p><p><em>Dragonspell</em> is a fine, well-written tale guaranteed to entertain both old and young alike. This was proven in our household when our eleven-year-old son snatched up the book and devoured it. Upon returning it, he exclaimed, It's good!high praise from a rabid fan of Tolkein, Lewis, Jacques and company. I can only nod my head in agreement. <br />Christopher A. Lane, Gold Medallion and C.S. Lewis award-winning author of children's and adult fiction  </p><p>Inventive, engaging, witty, insightful, touching, and profound <em>Dragonspell </em>is all this and more. If Donita K. Paul's only intention was to create a world where readers encounter novelties and wonders at every turn, then she has succeeded admirably. But she actually does much more than this: she enables us to see our relationship with God and His world through new eyes. A delight for all true fans of fantasy literature. <br />Jim Ware, author of <em>God of the Fairy Tale</em> and co-author of _Finding God in the Lord of the Rings<br />_<br />Enchanting! A perilous quest, a timeless battle, an unlikely heroine, and a rousing adventure in a world of magic and mystery Donita K. Paul has concocted a tale brimming with eternal truth and seasoned with delightful and amazing characters that linger in the senses long after the last page. <em>Dragonspell</em> is destined to become a classic for a new generation of adventurers!<br />Susan May Warren, award-winning author of _Happily Ever After<br />_<br />The greatest thing any author can do is to catch you up and transport you right into the very scene, the very action, the story . . . in such a way that you live the book, not merely read it. That is exactly what Donita K. Paul does with <em>Dragonspell</em>. For a few hours, you will take a journey to a place you have never been, with a story you will never forget. Enjoy the trip! <br />Stephen Bly, author of _Paperback Writer <em>and Christy-award-winning </em>The Long Trail Home<br />_<br /><em>Dragonspell</em> is a tightly written fantasy quest set in an extraordinarily rendered storyworld. With seven intelligent races, seven evil races, several delightful dragons, one weird wizard, and an endless supply of exotic plants and animals, you will NOT be bored.<br />Randy Ingermanson, Christy award-winning author of <em>Oxygen</em> and <em>Premonition</em>  </p><p>No one will ever be able to read this and doubt that Christian fantasy is a viable genre for spreading God's word. <br />Christine Lynxwiler, president of American Christian Romance Writers  </p><p>Charming, well-drawn characters, a story chock full of adventures and misadventures, a land populated with dragons, doneels, emerlindians, grawligs, and all sorts of other fascinating inhabitants I ask you, what more could any reader want With <em>Dragonspell</em>, Donita K. Paul has nailed a complex and engaging fantasy world. Whether nine or ninety, you won't be disappointed. <br />Kathleen Morgan, author of <em>Consuming Fire </em>and <em>All Good Gifts</em>  </p><p>_ Dragonspell _has a heart-thumping, page-turning plot that is sure to captivate and enthrall even the most reluctant reader! <br />Peggy Wilber, author of _Reading Rescue 1-2-3<br />_ -- <em>Review</em></p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>Claire Randall is leading a double life. She has a husband in one century, and a lover in another...In 1945, Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon--when she innocently touches a boulder in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach—an "outlander"—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of our Lord...1743.Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire's destiny in soon inextricably intertwined with Clan MacKenzie and the forbidden Castle Leoch. She is catapulted without warning into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life ...and shatter her heart. For here, James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, shows her a passion so fierce and a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire...and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.</p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p><em>Starred Review.</em> In this sprawling and vividly imagined fantasy, historical novelist Durham (_Pride of Carthage_) chronicles the downfall and reinvention of the Akaran Dynasty, whose empire, called Acacia, was built on conquest, slaving and drug trade. The Acacian empire, encompassing "The Known World," is hated by its subjugated peoples, especially the Mein, who 22 generations earlier were exiled to the icy northland. Having sent an assassin to kill the Acacian king, Leodan, the rebel chieftain, Hanish Mein, declares war on the empire. As Acacia falls, Leodan's treasonous but conflicted chancellor, Thaddeus Clegg, spirits the king's four children to safety. When the Mein's rule proves even more tyrannical than the old, the former chancellor seeks to reunite the now adult Akaran heirs—the oldest son Aliver (once heir to the throne), the beautiful elder daughter Corinn, their younger sister, Mena, and youngest brother, Dariel—to lead a war to regain the empire. Durham has created a richly detailed alternate reality leavened with a dollop of magic and populated by complicated personalities grappling with issues of freedom and oppression. <em>(June)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>David Anthony Durham, the author of three historical novels, envisions a fascinating, fully developed world in <em>Acacia</em>. He delves into great detail-explaining religious beliefs, political philosophies, even courting rituals-to draw the reader into his creation. Critics acknowledge the necessity of these "info dumps" (_Science Fiction and Fantasy News_) as setups for future volumes of the saga, while maintaining that the frequent descriptions did not detract from the absorbing, fast-paced plot. Readers won't find any wizards or dragons in <em>Acacia</em>; it is narrated in the alternating voices of genuine, convincing characters that blur the lines between good and evil. Packed with suspense, intrigue, and adventure, most readers will devour this first <em>Acacia</em> installment and impatiently await the next.<br><em>Copyright © 2004 Phillips &amp; Nelson Media, Inc.</em></p>

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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>Combines the texts of two sequels to the best-selling The Ship Who Sang in a single volume, following the adventures of Tia and Nancia, who overcome paralysis by becoming starship-controlling "brains" that respectively protect other young people from suffering a similar fate and preserve the interests of the Central Worlds Courier Service.</p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Alien abductions are fast becoming an SF cliché, but bestseller Foster (_Dirge_) puts a fresh spin on the theme in the wacky first book of a new comic SF series about Marcus Walker, a Chicago commodities broker, and George, a talking dog. Both fall victim to the seven-foot Vilenjji, who roam outer space and snatch specimens from various backward planets to sell as novelty pets to wealthy clients. Marc and George are the only Earth samples in the vast traveling zoo en route to an undisclosed alien marketplace. The other oxygen-breathing sentients—caged in enclosures that imaginatively echo the places where they were captured—can communicate with each other and their captors, due to implants that have been softwired into their brains. Much mayhem ensues as Marc and the streetwise mutt decide to attempt an escape with fellow zoo allies, the huge, very scary, always hungry poetry-spouting Braouk ("Sorrow is sharing, the abducted are together, many one") and the tiny, bejeweled, hysterically superior Sque ("a female of the K'eremu"). Walker's enthusiasm in taking stock of the assets at their disposal in their wild bid for freedom—something his work has taught him to do "when faced with a difficult set of circumstances"—and George's doggy determination make this a winner for all ages. <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Young-turk commodities-trader Marc Walker is camping alone in the California wilderness to win a bet with his hometown Chicago buddies when he's cold-cocked by buglike purple aliens and whisked into interstellar space. When he comes to, he finds himself isolated in a force field, along with his tent; selected pieces of the surrounding Sierra Nevada scenery; and George, a dog that talks, thanks to a universal translator and canine cranial upgrade. Through his furry friend and a snooty, octopus-like fellow captive, Walker learns that he and a menagerie of colorful extraterrestrials are prisoners on a galactic slave ship and destined to be sold as curios by their enterprising, amoral captors to the highest bidder. The parable of humans plucked for an alien zoo has been told often in sf but never with greater flare and more intrigue. Foster doles out enough wit, suspense, and original alien anthropology to keep readers spellbound from chapter one on. The utterly enchanted may look forward to a pair of sequels filling out a prospective trilogy. <em>Carl Hays</em><br /><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>He was just a freckle-faced, redheaded kid with green eyes and a strangely campelling stare when Mather Mastiff first saw him an the auctioneer's block. One hundred credits and he was hers.</p><p>For years the old woman was his only family. She loved him, fed him, taught him everything she knew -- even let him keep the deadly flying snake he called Pip.</p><p>Then Mother Mastiff mysteriously disappeared and Flinx took Pip to tail her kidnappers. Across the forests and swamps of the winged world called Moth, their only weapons were Pip's venom . . . and Flinx's unusual Talents. </p><h3>From the Inside Flap</h3><p>He was just a freckle-faced, redheaded kid with green eyes and a strangely campelling stare when Mather Mastiff first saw him an the auctioneer's block. One hundred credits and he was hers.  </p><p>For years the old woman was his only family. She loved him, fed him, taught him everything she knew -- even let him keep the deadly flying snake he called Pip.  </p><p>Then Mother Mastiff mysteriously disappeared and Flinx took Pip to tail her kidnappers. Across the forests and swamps of the winged world called Moth, their only weapons were Pip's venom . . . and Flinx's unusual Talents. </p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>Dr. Gabriel Cousens, M.D. is an internationally celebrated spiritual teacher, author, lecturer, world peace worker, and physician of the soul. He is the world's foremost physician promoting live food nutrition for physical health and spiritual growth. He received his M.D. degree from Columbia Medical School in 1969, and completed his psychiatry residency in 1973. As a leading researcher and practitioner in the field of rejuvenation, he specializes in the healing of many chronic degenerative diseases. To the healing process he also brings experience as a homeopathic physician (M.D. (H)), Diplomate in Ayurveda, family therapist, and live-food nutritionist. Dr. Cousens is also a Doctor of Divinity (D.D.), a Rebbe who has received rabbinical initiation, a student of Ecstatic Kabbalah since 1986, a certified Senior Essene Teacher in the Kabbalistic tradition, a recognized Yogi, a four-year Sundancer adopted into the Lakota Nation, and the White Buffalo Spirit Dance Chief. He is the author of a number of titles, including "Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine, Spiritual Nutrition, Depression-Free for Life, Creating Peace by Being Peace, "and" Tachyon Energy: A New Paradigm in Holistic Healing," co-authored with David Wagner, the creator of the Tachyon process. Dr. Cousens presents seminars worldwide on many topics including health and nutrition, psycho-spiritual healing, meditation, and spiritual awareness. Dr. Cousens founded and directs the Tree of Life Foundation, Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, and Tree of Life Health Practice in Patagonia, Arizona. He is a frequent guest on popular radio talk shows, and has published articles in health journals and popular magazines on a number of health, nutrition, and social topics. Visit his website at www.treeoflife.nu.</p>


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The second in a trilogy of novels from "New York Times "best-selling author Richard Baker.  "Farthest Reach "is the second novel in a trilogy chronicling the tempestuous return of an isolated society of elves to the mainland of the Forgotten Realms world. The events in this trilogy will have a far-reaching impact across the entire setting.  AUTHOR BIO: RICHARD BAKER works as a game designer and Managing Developer for the roleplaying game line at Wizards of the Coast, Inc. A "New York Times "bestselling author with "Condemnation," his additional Forgotten Realms novels include The "City of Ravens." "From the Paperback edition."


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In the hands of an elf high-mage, the fabled mythals are Faerun's most potent sources of magical power. But in the hands of a demon princess from a forgotten epoch, they're the most powerful weapons imaginable. "From the Paperback edition."


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<div><h3>Product Description</h3><p>The prequel series to <em>The Ghost King</em> comes to an explosive end!  </p><p>Cadderly journeys home to the Edificant Library, hoping to rebuild his shattered life--but the chaos curse has one last surprise in store for him. Failure means the loss of his beloved Danica, success might usher in a new era for the followers of Denier. </p>

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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>One year after her little boy Danny dies, his mother swears that she sees him in a stranger's car, and becoming obsessed with the mystery, she journeys to Las Vegas and the High Sierras in search of the truth. Reissue." </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p><strong>Dean Koontz</strong> is one of the best selling writers in the world. He lives in Newport Beach with his wife. </p>


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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>"The masterpiece among Bioy Casares' short, intense novels is The Invention of Morel, a book that won raves from Borges (who placed it alongside Franz Kafka's The Trial), was called "perfect" by Octavio Paz, and inspired one of French cinema's most infamous moviesf, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Though it was published in 1940, the book's continuing relevance was recently proven when it was featured on Lost — a cameo many viewers perceive as a key to that TV show's plot. But that doesn't mean this is a tough tract unfit for quality beach time... Just know that Morel is a poetic evocation of the experience of love, an inquiry into how we know one another, and a still-relevant examination of how technology has changed our relationship with reality. It's also a great read — one you'll be pressing into the hands of your fellow beach-goers." --Boldtype </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>The Island of Doctor Moreau inspired this 1940 novella. Set on a mysterious island, The Invention of Morel is a story of suspense and exploration as well as an unlikely romance, where every detail is both crystal clear and deeply mysterious. Susan Jill Levine's revision of Ruth Simm's translation offers a new experience of an uncanny work of genius. </p>

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August 1611. Jack Fletcher is shipwrecked off the coast of Japan - his beloved father and the crew lie slaughtered by ninja pirates. Rescued by the legendary sword master Masamoto Takeshi, Jack's only hope is to become a samurai warrior. and so his training begins. But life at the samurai school is a constant fight for survival. Even with his friend Akiko by his side, Jack is singled out by bullies and treated as an outcast. With courage in his heart and his sword held high, can Jack prove himself and face his deadliest rival yet?


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<div><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Grade 6-9 Bradford raises the stakes for his blond samurai student in this second installment in the series. Previously shipwrecked after his father was murdered by the ninja leader Dragon Eye, Jack is continuing his training as a samurai at his foster father's school for young warriors. Dedicated to keeping his father's navigational log from Dragon Eye, who has tried to steal it before, Jack hides the book at the castle of the daimyo, where he feels it will be safer. In the meantime, he must train to participate in the Circle of Three, a trial that would allow him to learn a double-sword-fighting technique, one he feels he needs to defend himself against the ninja's treachery. To add to his worries, his friend Akiko is acting strangely, disappearing in the night, and Jack suspects she may be training as a ninja. Bradford combines the structure of a British school story with the flavor of 17th-century Japan, and his descriptions of both swordplay and hand-to-hand martial arts reveal his extensive knowledge of the subject. Young martial artists will be eager to try out sticky-hands drills in their own dojos. Though the secondary cast is often too large to keep track of and only a few of the characters are fully developed, the ongoing struggle between honorable samurai and dastardly ninja will draw both reluctant readers and enthusiasts of Japanese history. <em>Alana Joli Abbott, James Blackstone Memorial Library, Branford, CT</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>In The Way of the Warrior (2009), shipwrecked Jack began his training as a samurai after watching the vile ninja Dokugan Ryu murder his father. In his second year of training, Jack perfects a few new techniques while dodging his adopted society’s increasing hostility toward foreigners. Bradford takes special care and pleasure in describing the minutiae of martial arts and other aspects of Japanese culture. With straightforward prose, he has managed to pen lively and exciting fight sequences and is slowly beginning to develop a keen edge to his cast of characters, laying significant groundwork for future installments. Grades 6-9. --Ian Chipman </p>

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June 1613. Japan is threatened with war and Jack is facing his greatest battle yet. Samurai are taking sides and, as the blood begins to flow, Jack's warrior training is put to the ultimate test. His survival and that of his friends depends upon him mastering the Two Heavens, the secret sword technique of the legendary samurai Masamoto Takeshi. But first Jack must recover his father's prize possession from the deadly ninja Dragon Eye. Can Jack defeat his ruthless enemy? Or will the ninja complete his mission to kill the young samurai . . .


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>Jack Fletcher is on the run. With no sensei to guide him, he has just his wits and his swords against many new and unknown enemies, as he journeys along the treacherous road to the port of Nagasaki and perhaps home...But the Shogun's samurai are hot on his trail. Barely escaping their clutches, Jack runs headlong into a trap. Kidnapped by ninja and led to their village deep in the mountains, Jack has no means of escape. The only question is who will kill him first - the ninja or samurai? </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Chris Bradford has trained in karate, kickboxing and samurai swordsmanship. He earned his black belt in Zen Kyo Shin Taijutsu, the secret fighting art of the ninja. Before writing the Young Samurai series, he was a professional musician and songwriter and has performed for HRH Queen Elizabeth II. You can learn more about Chris Bradford and his books at www.youngsamurai.com. </p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><strong>Penzler Pick, February 2000</strong>: Just as Robert B. Parker and Dennis Lehane have made Boston their own and Los Angeles has been the distinct province of a lineage leading from Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald to Michael Connelly and Robert Crais, so is George Pelecanos the storyteller who's put Washington, D.C., on the noir map. Once considered "the best-kept secret in crime fiction" by his peers, he is now fast leaving behind those days of strictly word-of-mouth fame and cult status. </p><p>Telling it like he sees it, and looking fearlessly into those dark, forgotten alleyways that lay too far beyond the corridors of power to make it into any guidebooks, Pelecanos conjures up a gritty, ghostly Washington of working-class neighborhoods and aging suburbs and shoots it through with chillingly unpredictable menace. Most Washington natives probably wouldn't recognize the place--but they couldn't stop trying either, knowing that they've at least glimpsed (out of the corners of their eyes) those environs where a Pelecanos character is most at home.</p><p>In <em>Shame the Devil</em>, we find a society of grieving men and women connected by loss, betrayal, the need for revenge, and the shadowy presence of evil. As in other Pelecanos tales, the heroes are not easily identified, love is a coming together of wounded souls, and answers are found where least expected. In the aftermath of a botched armed robbery, a fair number of lives have been thrown into a downward spiral. The problems, however, come on faster and with more fury once the status quo sustaining the survivors has been breached by an ill-wishing and unwanted addition to their little group.</p><p>Here are two favorite moments. In one, protagonist Dimitri Karras asks the name of a fellow bar patron. Hearing that he's called Happy, Karras comments that he doesn't look too happy. The answer: "He's pacing himself." The other: we hear the thoughts of the sociopathic villain: "Some believed that incarceration was a mark of failure, but Frank disagreed. Prison was an essential element of any career criminal's education."</p><p>With <em>Shame the Devil</em>, Pelecanos solidifies his position among the elite of the brilliant coterie of young noir writers who are creating the emerging classics of the genre. <em>--Otto Penzler</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>When the shooting stops on a blistering summer day at May's Pizza Parlor in Washington, D.C., in 1995, five people lie dead, a policeman is left crippled and robber Frank Farrow speeds off with his loot and not a trace of regret. But Farrow, the main villain in Pelecanos's fine new addition to his hard-boiled lineup, still isn't satisfied. He wants to return to finish off the injured cop, who killed Farrow's brother during the shoot-out. Farrow doesn't anticipate, however, the burning desire for revenge harbored by the family and friends of those butchered in the notorious pizza bloodbath. Chief among them is 50-ish Dimitri Karras, whose five-year-old son died when he was mowed down by the getaway vehicle Farrow was driving. Now, three years later, Karras is just getting his life back together, much like the other survivors, all of whom meet regularly to share their grief and soothe their torment. By chance, Karras teams up with Nick Stephanos, a freelance investigator who finds out Farrow is back in town to exact his twisted vengeance. Stephanos tries to dissuade Karras from tracking down Farrow, but even he understands the urge for retaliation. Karras and Stephanos, who have starred in several of Pelecanos's earlier books (King Suckerman; The Sweet Forever), deepen considerably as characters in this hard-driving story of heartache, Stephanos's adjustment to the new-found maturity of middle age and Dmitri's search for some small relief in revenge. Set against a backdrop of greasy-spoon diners, church basements, dive bars and sparsely furnished apartments, the narrative is unsettlingly harsh yet captivatingly tender, the gritty back-and-forth of everyday urban life vividly etched. 11-city author tour. (Jan.) <br />Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>The real test of an author's skill is sometimes to be found not in an unusually conceived work, but in his or her ability to create a consuming tale out of what, in outline form, might sound like an all-too-familiar or mundane plot line. In another novelist's hands, for instance, <em>Drama City</em> might have been a perfectly serviceable but regrettably unmemorable story of redemption and revenge set in the grittier districts of Washington, D.C. But with George Pelecanos at the reins, it becomes a poignant, profound yarn about men--the good, the bad, and the still undecided--trying to find their footing amid the centrifugal forces at play in a modern inner city.</p><p>Pelecanos's first standalone after four consecutive novels starring private eye Derek Strange (including <strong> and </strong>), <em>Drama City</em> introduces Lorenzo Brown, a young, black onetime criminal enforcer who's recently returned to the streets after doing eight years in prison on a felony drug charge. Crime and criminals had always been fundamental to Lorenzo's existence. ("Y'all know how that is. I ran with some boys, one in particular, and when those boys and my main boy went down to the corner I went with 'em. They were my people, the closest thing I ever had to male kin.") Since his release, though, he's been serving as a Humane Law Enforcement Officer with the Humane Society, protecting animals from the panoply of domestic cruelty, trying to leave both the drugs and the thugs behind. This attitude has won him a few champions, notably Rachel Lopez, his striking half-Jewish, half-Latina probation officer and friend, who spends her days "telling other people that they need to stay on track," but then goes off the rails at night, haunting hotel bars, picking up inappropriate guys, always frightened by the idea of a relationship "where she was not in complete control." Of course, these delicate balances of individual behavior are only possible in the absence of the unexpected. When a seemingly inconsequential mistake incites a lethal turf battle between rival gang bosses Nigel Johnson and Deacon Taylor, and Rachel is stabbed in the chest by a volatile, hopped-up gunman, Lorenzo finds his killer instincts returning to the fore. He must decide how far he's willing to go--and how much he's willing to lose--in order to exact retribution.</p><p>A simple plot on its face, yet given high stakes and a heroic edge by Pelecanos's portrayal of Brown as a man-in-progress struggling to secure his liberty from the past, helped along by his unexpectedly sympathetic former boss, childhood friend Nigel Johnson. Less satisfyingly rendered is Lopez, whose acrobatic swings to the wild side provide merely arousing diversions, without adequate character development. Bearing soul as well as teeth, <em>Drama City</em> gives off the air of a Greek tragedy. You know things are going to get bad before they turn worse, but Pelecanos keeps you riveted throughout. --_J. Kingston Pierce_</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Pelecanos's later fiction, set on the drug-saturated streets of ghetto Washington, D.C., is charged with the dark, unrelenting inevitability of Greek myth. In the author's 13th novel, "dog man" Lorenzo Brown, a street investigator for the Humane Society, has recently completed an eight-year stretch in prison for narcotics and is determined to stay clean and free. Rachel Lopez, Lorenzo's parole officer, spends her days chasing down clients and her nights getting drunk in bars and having rough sex with strangers. The ignition point for the violence that eventually engulfs these two fully realized, attractive characters—characteristics that in Pelecanos's world mark them as quite probably doomed—is a minor argument between local drug kingpins that inflates into a series of revenge killings. Pelecanos is known for his bleak, uncompromising outlook (_Hard Resolution_; <em>Hell to Pay</em>; <em>The Sweet Forever</em>) and while the death and destruction are still here in full force, some fans may question the turnaround in his ending. Might it be an attempt to hit the megabestseller stardom that fans think he deserves? Hope and redemption are fine subjects for many novelists, but it's the stark world of violence and despair that this author really owns. <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. In yet another gem of urban noir, bestseller Pelecanos (_The Night Gardener_) explores the possibility of making the turnaround, of starting over and building a new life, regardless of the past. One summer day in 1972, three teenage white boys—Alex Pappas and his friends Billy Cachoris and Pete Whitten—drive into a poor Washington, D.C., neighborhood, high on booze and weed, looking for trouble. They confront three young black men, Billy winds up dead and Alex badly beaten. In 2007, Alex runs the family coffee shop, as did his father, and grieves for his son, recently killed in Iraq. Then, one of the black survivors of the incident contacts Alex, opening a door that may finally put the trauma of the past to rest. At the same time, another survivor, the man who beat Alex, has gotten out of prison and has extortion on his mind. The result is a beautifully written and thought-provoking novel of crime, friendship, aging and redemption. <em>(Aug.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>While some may see shades of Tom Wolfe’s <em>Bonfire of the Vanities </em>in Pelecanos’s plot—both deal with the after effects of a racially charged incident in the inner city—in reality they have little in common. Critics all commended Pelecanos’s ethos and his focus on what it means to be a man in modern America, rich and poor and white and black. Some praised the experience he gained writing for the HBO series <em>The Wire</em>, which focused on the problems of people a lot like those in <em>The Turnaround</em>. There was the occasional hint that the repeated focus on What It Means to Be a Man bordered on annoying, but if anyone can use the mystery novel as a vehicle for introspection and spiritual longing, it’s Pelecanos.<br />Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC </p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Greg Egan became the hottest new science-fiction author of the 1990s and won the Hugo and John W. Campbell Memorial awards by extrapolating cutting-edge quantum physics and consciousness theory to create rigorous and radical new visions of the posthuman future. <em>Schild's Ladder</em> affirms Mr. Egan's place, with </p><p>In <em>Schild's Ladder</em>, humanity has transcended both death and Earth, and discovered its home world is nearly unique as a cradle of life. As it spreads throughout the galaxy, humanity enjoys an almost utopian existence--until a scientist accidentally creates an impenetrable, steadily expanding vacuum that devours star systems and threatens the entire universe with destruction. </p><p>Tchicaya is a Yielder, member of the faction that believes this "novo-vacuum" deserves study. The opposing Preservationists--among them Mariama, his first love--seek to save worlds and destroy the novo-vacuum. Discord heats to terrorist violence; then enmities and alliances are turned upside-down by a discovery that may mean the novo-vacuum is, instead, a new and very different universe--and one which may contain life. <em>--Cynthia Ward</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Australian Egan (Teranesia) writes some of the hardest SF around in terms both of difficulty and cutting-edge scientific content, as shown in his latest challenging novel, set some 20,000 years in the future. Though superhuman by our standards, Egan's characters often disembodied intelligences who prefer to live as programs in virtual reality or in still stranger, high-tech media are still capable of making mistakes. At the start, an experiment in quantum physics goes badly astray, creating another universe with physical laws that differ from our own. Its border expanding at half the speed of light, this new universe swallows planetary systems whole. Fortunately, humanity is so highly developed that entire populations can be quickly evacuated with little if any loss of life. Soon the scientific community divides into two groups, those who would destroy the new universe, and those who would study it. The debate becomes even more tense when evidence of life is found behind the rapidly expanding border. Characters invariably speak the language of quantum physics fluently, and the author makes little effort to bring their discussion down to the layman's level. Not until the end, when scientists begin to explore the new universe, does Egan make any real attempt to engage the reader's senses or emotions. The pleasures of this impressive novel, although considerable, are almost entirely intellectual. <br />Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<h3>From</h3><p>Owen’s second entry in the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series surpasses his first, delivering a more cohesive story while sustaining the intricate connections among history, mythology, and literature. Nine years after their first adventure, the three Caretakers of the Imaginaruim Geographica return to the Archipelago of Dreams to solve a mystery: all of the children have vanished overnight, along with all of the Dragonships. To succeed, the Caretakers must piece together clues drawn from disparate sources, including Greek mythology, Peter Pan lore, the Pied Piper legend, and the historical Children’s Crusade. While the plot sometimes drags under the weight of its exposition, strong mystery elements, lots of action, and an irresistible sense of fun make this compulsively readable. The hitch lies in the question of audience: the allusions and references will mean the most to high school students, but the author’s writing style seems geared toward somewhat younger readers. Nevertheless, those who appreciate literary scavenger hunts, or those who can read past the allusions to the adventure underneath, will enjoy this standalone sequel. Grades 8-11. --Krista Hutley </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p><strong>"'The Crusade has begun'...</strong></p><p><em>"There's an old myth in the Archipelago," he went on softly, shaking his head. "A legend, really...I recall it mentioned a Crusade, but those events happened seven centuries ago. We always thought it was only a story."</em></p><p>It has been nine years since John, Jack, and Charles had their great adventure in the Archipelago of Dreams and became the Caretakers of the <em>Imaginarium Geographica.</em> Now they have been brought together again to solve a mystery: Someone is kidnapping the children of the Archipelago. And their only clue is a mysterious message delivered by a strange girl with artificial wings: "The Crusade has begun." Worse, they discover that all of the legendary Dragonships have disappeared as well.</p><p>The only chance they have to save the world from a centuries-old plot is to seek out the last of the Dragonships -- the <em>Red Dragon</em> -- in a spectacular journey that takes them from Sir James Barrie's Kensington Gardens to the Underneath of the Greek Titans of myth. With friends both familiar and new, they will travel through an extraordinary landscape where history, myth, and fable blend together to tell the oldest story in the world. And along the way, the Caretakers of the <em>Geographica</em> will discover that great deeds alone do not make heroes, and that growing <em>up</em> may be unavoidable...but growing <em>old</em> doesn't have to be. </p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>John and Jack are mystified when they discover a cryptic warning on a medieval manuscript—a warning that is not only addressed to them, but seems to have been written by their friend, Hugo Dyson. But before they can discover the origins of the book, Hugo walks through a door in time—and vanishes into the past. </p><p>In that moment, the world begins to change. Now, the Archipelago of Dreams and our world both suffer under the reign of the cruel and terrible Winter King. Dark beasts roam the countryside, and terror rules the land. </p><p>John and Jack must travel back in time—from the Bronze Age to the library in ancient Alexandria to the founding of the Silver Throne—to find the only thing that can save their friend and restore both words. The solution lies in the answer to a 2,000-year-old mystery: Who is the Cartographer? </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p><strong>James A. Owen</strong> is the author and illustrator of The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series; the creator of the critically acclaimed Starchild graphic novel series; and the author of the Mythworld series of novels.  He works at the Coppervale Studio in Silvertown, Arizona, where he lives with his family.</p>


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<h3>From</h3><p>War is coming in the fourth entry of The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica. The Winter King’s Shadow is using the Spear of Destiny to make a shadow army in the Archipelago of Dreams, while World War II looms in the real world. As the Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica meet with past legendary Caretakers, the Grail Child and her companions search for a mythic sword. The literary allusions are still clever and the story imaginative, but the pacing suffers from heavy exposition, much of it given in endless group conversations, and the conclusion is anticlimactic. This entry is purely for series fans. Grades 8-11. --Krista Hutley </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>The Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica are at war. The Imperial Cartological Society, led by Richard Burton, have collected all of the doors from the Keep of Time, and are building a new tower in our world at the request of an old enemy: The Winter King’s Shadow. He has a terrible weapon – The Spear of Destiny – that can be used to command the shadows of anyone it touches…including the protectors of the Archipelago, the dragons. With a ship called The Iron Dragon, the Shadow King regains passage to the Archipelago where he uses the power of the Spear and the portals of Time to enlist an unstoppable army of Dragon Shadows. And after the Archipelago falls, he intends to betray the Allies in our world – but not to align himself with the opposition. The Shadow King intends to use the turmoil of WWII to take over BOTH worlds. </p><p>All the legendary Caretakers, past and present, come together on a great island in the northermost part of the Archipelago to decide the ultimate fate of the Imaginarium Geographica, as a terrible battle ravages the lands around them. And their only hope lies with a small group of companions who are on the quest for the broken sword Caliburn: the Grail Child Rose Dyson; her mechanical companion, the owl Archie; a mouse with an attitude; a dead Professor of Ancient Literature; and the mythical knight, Don Quixote. </p><p>They must sail beyond the ends of the Archipelago in search of the sword, and the only being alive who can repair it: a scholar, who, once upon a time, was called Madoc. </p>


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<div><h3>From</h3><p>In the mystery genre, there's always room for a new premise, and Swain has come up with a doozy: his hero, Tony Valentine, is an ex-cop who specializes in catching casino cheats. The downside of the job is that Tony must work for casino owners, which is why, as this third entry in the high-spirited series begins, he is on the lam, enjoying a romance with a lady wrestler and even participating in the odd tag-team match. But when the romance founders and Tony gets a summons from the head of security at Florida's Micanopy Indian Reservation Casino, he heads for the Everglades. The scam is several layers deep--crooked blackjack dealers and fixed basketball games play roles, along with a couple of nasty alligators eager to test Tony's wrestling skills. The gambling details are a treat, the banter is worthy of a place at Elmore Leonard's table, and the Floridian sense of absurdity draws on Hiaasen without seeming derivative. With a new publisher willing to back Tony's play, Swain's ship just may have come in. <em>Bill Ott</em><br><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p><h3>Review</h3><p>“Ingenious entertainment.”<br>—_The New York Times Book Review  </p><p>_“IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT DOWN . . . ENDLESS FUN . . .<br><em>SUCKER BET</em> IS ITS OWN BEST PAYOUT.”<br>—_St. Petersburg Times<br>_<br>“[Swain is] an entertaining writer whose breezy style and flair for wise-guy dialogue make the story zoom by.”<br>—_The Boston Globe  </p><p>_“HITS THE JACKPOT . . . <em>SUCKER BET</em> IS A SURE THING.”<br>—_Chicago Tribune<em></em>  </p><p><strong>_“</strong>WOW, WHAT A DISCOVERY!<br><em></em>James Swain is the best new writer I have come across in a long, long time. <em>Sucker Bet </em>is wonderful. It snaps with the gritty feel of the truth. Swain has carefully added all of the ingredients: tragedy, humor, action, and most of all, a cast of characters that would make Elmore Leonard’s mouth water.”<br>—MICHAEL CONNELLY  </p><p>“Realistic, crisp dialogue spoken by three-dimensional characters . . . Swain moves <em>Sucker Bet</em> from the condos and hotels of Miami Beach to the suburbs of West Broward and the Everglades with a keen eye to the area.”<br>—_Ft. Lauderdale_ _Sun-Sentinel  </p><p><em>“</em>Sucker Bet_ is sheer magic. Fast and full or surprises, and rich with fascinating insider knowledge of casinos and gambling and world-class con men and bad guys of every denomination. James Swain is the real thing, a writer of pure, athletic prose, capable of bringing alive characters as original and three-dimensional as our best novelists. . . . Sign me up as a charter member of the Swain fan club.”—JAMES W. HALL<br>Author of _Blackwater Sound  </p><p>_“Swain has come up with a doozy. . . . The gambling details are a treat [and] the banter is worthy of a place at Elmore Leonard’s table. . . . Swain’s ship just JUNE have come in.”<br>—_Booklist<br>_  </p><p><em>From the Paperback edition.</em></p>

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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>“In this series about gambling, the main character is a big winner.”<br />–Janet Maslin, The New York Times  </p><p>“Bask in Swain’s Las Vegas without having to set foot in the place and risk being skinned alive.”<br />–The Washington Post Book World  </p><p>A blind poker player named Skip DeMarco is scamming the world’s largest poker tournament in Las Vegas, and cheating-expert Tony Valentine and his son, Gerry, have been hired to find out how. DeMarco is tied to some dangerously desperate characters who will go to extremes–even cold-blooded murder–to ensure that the obnoxious DeMarco wins big.  </p><p>While Gerry flies to Atlantic City to suss out DeMarco’s secret, Valentine stays in Vegas and teams up with an aging grifter named Rufus Steele, who has his own score to settle with DeMarco. On opposite sides of a deadly game, father and son work their way through a colorful landscape of conmen and hitmen. Together, they will have to prove there’s more to any game of chance than meets the eye.  </p><p>Featuring insider tips for catching poker cheats, as well as a glossary of card hustler terms! </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>James Swain, the bestselling author of Grift Sense, Funny Money, Sucker Bet, Loaded Dice, Mr. Lucky, and Deadman’s Poker, is also an authority on crooked gambling and casino scams. He is the winner of the prestigious Prix Calibre 38. He lives in Odessa, Florida, with his wife, Laura, and is currently at work on his next Tony Valentine novel. Visit the author’s website at www.jimswain.com. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. This blood-drenched, thought-provoking dissection of a three-day battle is set in the same world as Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy (The Blade Itself, etc.), but stands very well alone. Union commander Lord Marshal Kroy coordinates the fight with the aid of a motley group of incompetent, self-important officers. The strangely sympathetic Col. Bremer dan Gorst is officially a royal observer who nurses a burning desire to kill or be killed. Leading a much smaller army against the Union is Black Dow, whose grip on the throne of the Northmen is tenuous and based on fear and brutality. Calder, a slippery and cunning egotist, advocates peace while plotting to take Black Dow's place. Abercrombie never glosses over a moment of the madness, passion, and horror of war, nor the tribulations that turn ordinary people into the titular heroes. (Feb.) <br />(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"The Heroes is an indictment of war and the duplicity that corrupts men striving for total power: bloody and violent, but never gratuitously so, it's imbued with cutting humour, acute characterisation and world-weary wisdom about the weaknesses of the human race. Brilliant." -- Eric Brown THE GUARDIAN "An action-packed novel full of brutality, black-humour and razor sharp characterisation." -- Dave Bradley SFX The Heroes is the first major fantasy release of 2011, and it looks like the new year is already off to a cracking start. The Heroes is Joe Abercrombie doing what he does best but better than ever before: gritty, violent, morally ambiguous and darkly funny fantasy with a streak of intelligent cynicism." THE WERTZONE A well-constructed, absorbing war novel that returns to a familiar stamping ground. There's satisfying character development, exploration of the ironies of war, and of course plenty of blood and treachery, all delivered with Abercrombie's trademark wry humour." SPECULATIVE HORIZONS "Abercrombie's take on fantasy has always been dark, almost nihilistic, yet shot through with black humour. The deliberate irony of the title of this book is that he does not write about heroes, he writes about ordinary people thrust in to extraordinary situations who seldom, if ever, acquit themselves heroically. Highly recommended both for fantasy readers and lovers of Cornwell and Iggulden." BOOK GEEKS </p>


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History on a grand scale-an enchanting masterpiece that explores the making of one of the world's most vibrant civilizationsA People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, internationally renowned historian Orlando Figes does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg-a "window on the West"-and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself-its character, spiritual essence, and destiny. He skillfully interweaves the great works-by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall-with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world. Figes's characters range high and low: the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the Kingdom of God, as well as the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner's wife. Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in Tolstoy's War and Peace, the spirit of "Russianness" is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory-a powerful force that unified a vast country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state. Orlando Figes is the author of Peasant Russia, Civil War, and A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, which received the Wolfson Prize for History and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other distinctions. A regular contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, Figes is professor of history at Birbeck College, University of London. He lives in Cambridge, England, with his wife and two daughters. A New York Times Notable BookShortlisted for the Samuel Johnson PrizeOrlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, Eric Hobsbawm wrote, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, he does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg—a "window on the West"—and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself: its character, spiritual essence, and destiny. What did it mean to be Russian—an illiterate serf or an imperial courtier? Figes interweaves the great works, by Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Stravinsky and Chagall, with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world. His characters range high and low: Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the Kingdom of God; the serf girl Praskovya, who became the Russian opera's first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner's wife; Stravinsky, who returned to Russia after fifty years in the West and discovered that the homeland he had left had never left his heart. Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in War and Peace, the spirit of "Russianess" is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory—a powerful force that unified a vast, riven country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state. “Absolutely brimming with ideas, full of unforgettable stories and characters, Natasha's Dance tells a most remarkable story: How a backward country, obsessed with its backwardness, managed in a single century to produce the most passionate, innovative, searching art and literature of any Western society, in the process transforming Western culture as a whole. In the telling, Orlando Figes displays his gift for narrative power, his love of telling detail, and his great compassion for the lunatics and geniuses who fill his pages. Extraordinary.”—Michael Ignatieff "Masterly."—John Bayley, The New York Review of Books"Absolutely brimming with ideas, full of unforgettable stories and characters, Natasha's Dance tells a most remarkable story: How a backward country, obsessed with its backwardness, managed in a single century to produce the most passionate, innovative, searching art and literature of any Western society, in the process transforming Western culture as a whole. In the telling, Orlando Figes displays his gift for narrative power, his love of telling detail, and his great compassion for the lunatics and geniuses who fill his pages. Extraordinary."—Michael Ignatieff"Stunning and ambitious . . . Its thematic chapters examine such subjects as art, customs, folklore, religion, cuisine, education, and—most important—the works of novelists, poets, composers, historians, philosophers, and choreographers. Figes captures nothing less than Russians' complex and protean notions regarding their national identity, and their tortured and not infrequently violent efforts to define and determine it."—The Atlantic Monthly"An immensely learned, ambitious effort to view Russian history through the lens of its arts, music, and literature . . . A superb, enlightening work."—Kirkus Reviews"Figes' new work goes far more deeply and profoundly into that aggregation of feelings, attitudes, and hopes than any political or social approach could. A revealing and stimulating effort."—Robert Conquest, author of The Harvest of Sorrow and The Great Terror"A most welcome sequel to Figes's much-praised history of the Russian Revolution . . . Figes succeeds in describing the extraordinary scope and power of Russian culture—and in outlining its great themes and issues—in a way that gives the reader a far better understanding of Russia than any history focusing solely on the progress of autocrats, wars and conquests . . . One welcome feature is that it draws much of its material directly from original Russian sources, giving a firsthand taste of the richness and variety of Russian art that scholarly works often exclude . . . Natasha's Dance covers enormous ground, ranging across the impact of the Mongol occupation, the influence of Russian Orthodoxy, the ravages of Stalinism and its attempt to harness art to its ideological agenda through the doctrine of Socialist Realism and the Russians in exile."—Serge Schmemann, The New York Times Book Review"A tour de force by the great scholarly storyteller of modern Russian historians . . . Just as all things Russian require the hyperbolic superlative, so do Figes’ Russian histories: he has done it again. Written beautifully, with striking wit, joie de vivre and learning worn lightly, magnificently and broadly researched, with brilliant but simple analysis, this superb, flamboyant, and masterful tour d’horizon is fun, anecdotal, and fascinating, colorful and playful."—Simon Seba-Montefiore, Financial Times"Figes’ description of the evolution of the Russian national identity is so successful and so much fun to read that I hesitate to write too much about it, for fear of spoiling the pleasures and surprises of the book for its potential audience . . . The themes are in some sense obvious: the national obsession with the ‘Russian soul'; the split between the Europeanised culture of the aristocrats and the native culture of the peasants; the influence (and the reaction against) the West—yet Figes has written about them in fresh and unusual ways."—Anne Applebaum, The Sunday Telegraph"Magnificent . . . This book examines the tangled roots of nationhood and culture . . . A joy to read."—Robert Service, The Guardian"Even if one takes nothing else away from this elegant, tightly focused survey of Russian culture, it's impossible to forget the telling little anecdotes that University of London history professor Figes relates about Russia's artists, writers, musicians, intellectuals and courtiers as he traces the cultural movements of the last three centuries. He shares Ilya Repin's recollection of how peasants reacted to his friend Leo Tolstoy's fumbling attempts to join them in manual labor ('Never in my life have I seen a clearer expression of irony on a simple peasant's face') . . . Full of resounding moments like these, Figes's book focuses on the ideas that have preoccupied Russian artists in the modern era: Just what is 'Russianness,' and does the quality come from its peasants or its nobility, from Europe or from Asia? He examines canonical works of art and literature as well as the lives of their creators: Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Chagall, Stanislavsky, Eisenstein and many others. Figes also shows how the fine arts have been influenced by the Orthodox liturgy, peasant songs and crafts, and myriad social and economic factors from Russian noblemen's unusual attachments to their peasant nannies to the 19th-century growth of vodka production. The book's thematically organized chapters are devoted to subjects like the cultural influence of Moscow or the legacy of the Mongol invasion, and with each chapter Figes moves toward the 1917 revolution and the Soviet era, deftly integrating strands of political and social history into his narrative. This is a treat for Russophiles and a unique introduction to Russian history."—Publishers Weekly


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p><em></em>"[Rennie Airth's] meticulously detailed procedural mysteries are beautifully written . . . well worth reading, and rereading." <br />-Marilyn Stasio, <em>The New York Times Book Review</em> <em></em>   </p><p>On a freezing London night in 1944, Rosa Novak is brutally murdered during a blackout. Scotland Yard suspects the young Polish refugee was the victim of a random act of violence and might have dropped the case if former police investigator John Madden hadn't been her employer. Madden feels he owes it to Rosa to find her killer and pushes the investigation, uncovering her connection to a murdered Parisian furrier, a member of the Resistance, and a stolen cache of diamonds.   </p><p>Delivering the atmospheric writing and compelling characters that have already established Rennie Airth as a master of suspense as well as style, this long-awaited third installment in the John Madden series is historical crime writing at its best. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p><strong>Rennie Airth</strong> is the author of two other John Madden mysteries, <em>River of Darkness</em> and <em>The Blood-Dimmed Tide</em>. He lives in Cortona, Italy. </p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>More than 10 years ago, I was shocked to learn that some puerile piece of fluff had won the Edgar for Best Paperback Original, when it was so obvious to me and virtually everyone else in the Western Hemisphere that the award should have gone to </p><p>The terrific Elvis Cole series has grown through the years, each book better than the last, but nothing prepared me for the quantum leap (yes, it's a cliché, but it belongs here) that Crais has made with <em>L.A. Requiem</em>. It's not as funny as the other books in the series, but it's a beautifully plotted detective story, rich with police procedure, and it will keep even the most sophisticated reader at sea right until the end. And that's what elevates this book to the level of literature. </p><p>This one is more about Joe Pike, Elvis's silent sidekick, than it is about Elvis. We learn, through Pike's own eyes, how his childhood made him the way he is today. It's also about a friendship so strong that it threatens Elvis's relationship with his beloved Lucy. It is a tender but dark book--a serial killer book--but it doesn't attempt to outgross the other serial killer books on the shelf. It is funny at times and chilling at other times, making it one of the rare books that can't help but linger in the memory long after it's been read and put away. <em>--Otto Penzler</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In his eighth book about wise-cracking Los Angeles private detective Elvis Cole, Crais has expanded his narrative reach and broadened his characters' horizons to produce a mature work that deserves to move him up a notch or twoAinto Parker or Connelly country. He's done this by focusing on Joe Pike, Cole's tough and hitherto totally enigmatic partner. It's Pike who breaks in on Cole's reunion with Lucy Chenier, his lawyer/broadcaster lover who has just moved from New Orleans, to ask for Elvis's help in tracking down the missing daughter of a rich and powerful Hispanic businessman. When the girl turns up murdered in Griffith Park, it's Pike who gives a nerdy medical examiner valuable assistance; and when it turns out that the girl's death is linked to several other murders, it's Pike who is charged with killing the chief suspect. Through flashbacks to Joe's past life as an abused child, a highly motivated teenage soldier and an L.A. cop fighting to keep a corrupt partner from destroying his family, we learn more about Pike than we did in the seven previous Cole books. This new focus also allows Crais to keep Elvis's often annoying throwaway lines to a minimumAalthough more pruning could have been done with no loss of flavor. The book's scope is wide enough to include many other memorable characters, especially a rough-edged, vulnerable police officer named Samantha Dolan, plus a choice of plausible villains. There may be one too many metaphoric descriptions attempting to link aspects of the L.A. landscape with the moods and deeds of its inhabitants, but overall Crais seems to have successfully stretched himself the way another Southern California writerARoss MacdonaldAalways tried to do, to write a mystery novel with a solid literary base. <br />Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>This second thriller in the series Woods inaugurated with Orchid Beach starts with a bang a literal one. While series heroine Holly Barker, a former military police commander turned police chief of smalltown Orchid Beach, Fla., waits at the local courthouse to marry lawyer Jackson Oxenhandler, her fianc‚ gets himself killed in a shoot-out at Orchid Beach's bank. Once past this shocker of an opening, the thrills quickly deflate. Holly stifles a few sobs, gets back into uniform and sets off to track down the gunmen, a gang of highly organized robbers who planned to heist $4 million in payroll cash. It soon becomes clear that they aren't ordinary robbers, however, appearing to have some connection to a weird little town in a neighboring county, where the average resident is white, male and a gun nut. In the course of his meandering tale, Woods deepens his portraits of Holly and her father, Ham, a retired army noncom, and dog lovers should enjoy the antics of Daisy, the Doberman diva who is Holly's constant companion. Stone Barrington, the cop-turned-lawyer from such Woods bestsellers as L.A. Dead, makes a couple of important cameo appearances. But pages of lifeless dialogue and too much dead air in an already thin narrative eventually stifle most of the book's energy. Woods knows how law enforcement agencies from local cop shops to the Secret Service work, and his action scenes are clean and sharp. But in between there are a lot of empty spaces. 16-city author tour. </p><p>Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.</p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>"Orchid blues," indeed: Holly's wedding day is ruined by a nearby bank robbery that leaves no clues but one unfortunate corpse, and when she investigates she finds that the robbery has political trimmings. <br />Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Stuart Woods is a master of the glitzy, high-concept, suspense thriller, and Stone Barrington, hero of five previous mysteries, is the kind of private cop who glides gracefully between lavishly detailed dinners, private jets, fancy parties, sexy assignations in luxury hotels, and the occasional murder investigation. Occasionally he gets his hands dirty, but more often it's his sheets. <em>L.A. Dead</em> finds him in Venice, where he's about to marry the beautiful (but seriously crazy) daughter of a high-ranking Mafioso, whose other daughter happens to be married to Stone's best friend--an NYPD cop, naturally. The civil ceremony's over, but the church wedding is only hours away when Stone is called to L.A., where his former lover has just discovered her husband's dead body. The lover is Arrington (an oddity, given Stone's surname; did Woods just run out of imagination here?), the dead husband is a famous movie star, and everyone believes she killed him. Everyone except Stone, who's still in love with Arrington. He has a helluva time interviewing (and bedding) all the women in her circle, including the dead husband's private secretary, Arrington's best friend, her lawyer's mistress, and a number of Hollywood wives. Jackie Collins does the ladies better, but Stone manages to save the damsel in distress, get rid of his nutty near-wife without offending her father, and wrap up all the details except the most important one. No doubt he's saving that for the next book. In the meantime, Woods's many fans will snap this up and spend the interim wondering: if Stone marries the woman of his dreams, will that make her Arrington Barrington? <em>--Jane Adams</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>This latest installment in Woods's Stone Barrington thriller series finds the lawyer/sleuth from New York back in Los Angeles on a murder case in which everyone, even the accused, lazes along, enjoying life in sunny Southern California. In his sixth outing (following 1999's Worst Fears Realized), Barrington is surrounded by his usual cast of friends, acquaintances and casual sex partners. The biggest change here is that his ex-lover, Arrington Calder, stands accused of murdering her husband, movie star and renowned man-about-town Vance Calder, found dead of a gunshot wound in the couple's Bel Air mansion. Upon hearing the news, Barrington, in Italy for his imminent wedding to the lovely but unpredictable Dolce Bianchi, rushes to L.A. to take over Arrington's defense. Not much of substance happens next; there's plenty of rambunctious sex, lots of light banter, a few tiffs and a minimal bit of sleuthing. Barrington checks out who left the size-12 shoe imprint near the murder scene and does his best to avoid Dolce, who took exception to her fianc 's sudden departure from the nuptials and is now stalking him. The whole case ends abruptly and with little suspense, and everyone goes along his or her merry way. Woods's desultory plottingDit is never made entirely clear who really killed Vance CalderDand chatty dialogue may not suit hardcore thriller or mystery readers, but Barrington's fans will likely welcome the detective's newest California-chic adventure. Mystery Guild main selection; BOMC and Literary Guild featured selections. (Oct.) <br>Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

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<div><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as "Theory of Mind" and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine’s surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Lisa Zunshine teaches English literature at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. </p>

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The latest title from popular Forgotten Realms® author Richard Lee Byers. The dead are restless in the magic-rich realm of Thay, and an evil necromancer begins to gather them to his cause--a cause that will change the face of Faerûn forever. "From the Paperback edition."


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>Join heroes fighting the undead hordes!  A powerful undead sorcerer reigns in Thay over a frightened people and hordes of undead. The mageocracy in exile, masters of no more than their beaten army, watch from distant shores as the new King of Thay prepares a great magical ritual--a ritual they cannot allow him to bring to completion.  The conclusion of The Haunted Lands series, the events in "Unholy" will have tremendous impact on the Forgotten Realms(R) world. "From the Paperback edition."</p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>Join heroes fighting the undead hordes!  Undead armies have massed and march to the beat of an evil necromancer's drum. The living citizens of the magic-rich realm of Thay must unite and mount a defense before they die and join their enemy's ranks.  The second book in The Haunted Lands series, the events in "Undead" will have tremendous impact on the Forgotten Realms world. "From the Paperback edition."</p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Author Anthony Bourdain is a talented chef whose two previous thrillers (<strong>, </strong>) were seasoned with the kind of culinary details that delighted the Food Channel-loving fans of his successful nonfiction books. The foodies will slaver over a wonderfully wrought scene in his latest caper novel--it's set at a chic Manhattan restaurant where a gourmand gangster with a picky palate turns the chef's menu upside down and stiffs the poor waiter who has to accommodate him. But the rest of this otherwise slight and unseasoned novel doesn't live up to that wonderful appetizer. Its protagonist is Bobby Gold, an ex-con who works as a security guard at Eddie Fish's Nightclub and is involved with a sexy sous-chef named Nikki whose preparation of a special meal for her lover reads like Bourdain's version of foreplay. But when Nikki rips off the restaurant receipts and Bobby gets on the wrong side of a mob plan to kill Eddie's appetite for good while recouping the money, Bourdain's plotting goes sour and the ending fails to satisfy. Still, it's a nice side dish to go with a good cookbook, or even one of the author's zany true stories of what goes on behind the swinging doors of many real-life restaurants (<strong>, </strong>). <em>--Jane Adams</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>With the same explosive energy and irreverent humor with which he described the behind-the-scenes affairs of the restaurant industry in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain revisits some of the themes that made him famous: passion, food and violence. The novel (Bourdain's third, after Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo) tells the story of Bobby Gold, probably the world's most unlikely gangster. A nice Jewish pre-med student implicated in a drug deal gone bad, Bobby goes to prison for 10 years and emerges with an entirely different set of uses for his knowledge of anatomy. Once released, he goes to work for his old friend Eddie Fish, a mobster turned nightclub owner, and falls in love with Nikki, a boisterous sous-chef with dangerous ambitions. Bobby and Nikki get involved in a botched robbery, forcing both to run for their lives. Their seedy shenanigans are wittily chronicled by Bourdain, in his nouveau hard-boiled prose ("'You want truffle jiz? Get your own truffle jiz, cabron' "). In one memorable set piece, Bobby engages in multiple pages of rueful conversation with an old fish wholesaler who's late on a payment to Eddie and knows he's about to be worked over (" `I get to pick the arm?' <code>Sure,' said Bobby.</code>Your choice. You pick it' "). Readers will once again be delighted by Bourdain's charming, rugged sensibility, like a modern-day Damon Runyon, and his gourmet blend of wit, suspense and style.<br />Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>First-time author Bourdain presents a savory portion of gangster tartare spiced with salty mobspeak, coked-up chefs, wild entrepreneurs and foul-mouthed feds, served up in the colorful ambience of Manhattan's Little Italy. The FBI is using a former dentist to open and run a restaurant in a sting operation designed to catch 280-pound loan shark "Sally Wig" Patera-a crazed mafioso assigned to do the Don's dirty work. The deluded dentist thinks he really runs the Dreadnaught Grill and blows FBI cash on dumb marketing schemes instead of paying Sally's dues and vig. Meanwhile, Sally's nephew, Tommy Pagano, sous chef at the Dreadnaught, who loathes both his uncle and mob life, still feels loyal to the Family and so gives Sally after-hours use of the kitchen to "talk some business." But Tommy isn't happy when Sally and Skinny di Milito-who strips naked before his hits to cut down on blood-spatter cleanup-kill a fellow mobster and cut up the body with the chef's knife. Though the FBI pressures Tommy hard to sell out his uncle, he stays loyal, at least until the restaurant, the chef and his cooking career are threatened by Sally and Skinny, pushing him into unexpected action. The cast of this dark-humored, street-smart novel romps through Greenwich Village and Little Italy on a testosterone high in a perfect sendup of macho mobsters and feebs alike, while the kitchen antics reveal a real love for-and knowledge of-cooking, including a mouth-watering recipe for Portuguese Seafood Chowder, complete with squid, lobster, swordfish and cherrystone clams. Major ad/promo. <br />Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Bourdain's tongue-in-cheek wiseguy novel features an up-and-coming young chef who owes his position in a New York restaurant to his uncle, a Mob collector^-hit man who has loaned a considerable sum to the restaurant owner. Mobster Sal the Wig and Tommy, the sous-chef, are both unaware that state and federal agents have set up the owner, Harvey, as a plant to uncover extortion, murder, and whatever other criminal activities occur in Harvey's presence or the eaterie. The combination of fine food and sordid slayings makes an irresistible novel, but perhaps not one to savor while dining. <em>Denise Perry Donavin</em></p>


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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>“No fan of Indiana Jones, Matthew Reilly or action in general will be able to put it down.” —_Northern Territory News_, on _The Pyramid of Doom<br> _<br>“Raises the bar to please adventure junkies who prefer to mainline their action.”—_Publishers Weekly _(starred review), on <em>The Hunt for Atlantis</em></p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>A DARING HEIST.<br>A PRICELESS ARTIFACT.<br>A SECRET LOCKED SAFELY AWAY—UNTIL NOW. </p><p>When Michelangelo’s <em>David</em> is stolen from its museum in Florence, it’s only the latest in a series of audacious raids on the world’s greatest treasures. But American archaeologist Nina Wilde and her husband, ex-mercenary Eddie Chase, discover the raiders’ ultimate target when the Talonor Codex—a cryptic travel journal that Nina found in Atlantis—is snatched from a well-guarded exhibition right in front of their eyes. </p><p>The codex holds clues to the location of the Vault of Shiva and its mythical contents: the chronicles of the ancient Hindu god of destruction himself. From a deadly shootout in San Francisco to a hidden valley in the snowbound Himalayas, Nina and Eddie must run a labyrinthine gauntlet of ruthless killers, corrupted faiths, and twisted ambitions to reach the sacred vault ahead of a cunning billionaire with a plot to remake the world—after he brings this one crashing down. </p></div>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>For music lovers, perfectionists, and estheticians, Thomas Bernhard's <em>The Loser</em> (1983) poses an irresistible drama of failed excellence. In 1953 three friends, among whom is the famed Glenn Gould, study with Horowitz. Rarely sleeping, hardly eating, they burn intensely with the white and ruthless flame of virtuosity. Only Gould ascends. But this is no conventional narrative--neat, action-driven, or linear. It opens with the specter of death--Gould's at 51, and a suicide. Art exalts even as it destroys, when the aspirant is found wanting. Both Wertheimer, the suicide, and the narrator turn their backs on their musical careers, thus triggering their process of "deterioration." What is the consequence of throwing it all away? And yet, what are the rewards of realized genius? After Gould becomes, indeed, <em>Glenn Gould</em>, the two friends go to visit him in Canada. "He had barricaded himself in his house. For life. All our lives the three of us have shared the desire to barricade ourselves from the world. All three of us were born barricade fanatics."</p><p>Bernhard fans will recognize the restrained rant, the execution of an idea carried to a logical, caustic extreme. The rant creates, of the novel, a grand philosophical speculation: What is devotion to one's art? What is it to truly understand one's art and to not misuse one's gift? And, alas, <em>The Loser</em> can also be read as the profound consequence of perfectionism, whereby all efforts to create or execute anything of note are squashed in the critical mind's ruthless self-scrutiny. The narrator works, for example, on his Glenn Gould essay for nine years, grateful, in the end, that he has published nothing. "How good it is that none of these imperfect, incomplete works has ever appeared, I thought, had I published them.... [T]oday I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness." The one regenerative act seems to be that of self-destruction. Destruction, indeed, becomes the flip side of perfectionist rigor. Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) was his own unique genius and in <em>The Loser</em>, one of his most acclaimed novels, he creates a chilling portrait of tragic compulsion, teasing and testing our assumptions human behavior. --_Hollis Giamatteo_</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The late Austrian novelist meditates on Glenn Gould, the Canadian virtuoso pianist, in this fictive memoir of an imaginary friendship between Gould and the narrator. (June) Also forthcoming from Vintage International in June is Gathering Evidence ($14 * <br />Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>A startling, seductive literary novel that entwines suspense, science fiction, adventure, romance and history into an intoxicating new genre.1908: New Venice--"the pearl of the Arctic"--a place of ice palaces and pneumatic tubes, of beautifully ornate carriage-sleds and elegant victorian garb, of long nights and vistas of ice.But as the city prepares for spring, it feels more like qaartsiluni, "the time when something is about to explode in the dark." Local "poletics" are wracked by tensions with the Eskimos circling the city, with suffragette riots led by an underground music star, with drug round-ups by the secret police force known as the Gentlemen of the Night. An ominous black airship hovers over the city, and the Gentlemen are hunting for the author of a radical pamphlet calling for revolt.Their lead suspect is Brentford Orsini, one of the city's most prominent figures. But as the Gentlemen of the Night tighten the net around him, Orsini receives a mysterious message from a long-lost love that compels him to act.What transpires is a literary adventure novel unlike anything you've ever read before. Brilliant in its conception, masterful in its prose, thrilling in its plot twists, and laced with humor, suspense, and intelligence, it marks the beginning of a great new series of books set in New Venice-and the launch of an astonishing new writer.</p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>Diran used to make his living as an assassin --- one of the best money could buy. But after a life-altering spiritual experience, he's turned his back on killing. All he wants is peace. But in a shoddy port city, his past catches up to him, and killing may be the only way to bring peace to a city on the verge of destruction. </p>


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SUMMARY:
Living in the war-ravaged realm of Eberron, assassin-turned-priest Diran Bastiaan and his half-orc sidekick, Ghaji, make an unlikely pair. One looks like the stuff of nightmares, while the other is "a conduit through which the holy force of Good could work its will in the physical world." Together, they have traveled throughout the archipelagic Lhazaar Principalities sharing numerous wild adventures, but none were as dangerous as the one they currently face. When a gang of bloodthirsty pirates kidnaps Diran's former lover (a beautiful ex-mercenary killer named Makala), the priest of the Silver Flame and his half-breed wingman vow to get her -- and countless other abductees -- back no matter what the cost. But the seafaring raiders are no ordinary criminals; they're led by the infamous vampire Onkar, who in turn serves a being unfathomably more evil than himself….


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>Acclaimed author Tim Waggoner brings his first <strong>Eberron</strong> trilogy to a stunning conclusion.  </p><p>Diran, once a feared assassin, has turned his back on murder, seeking the life of a wandering priest. But in the seas of the Lhazaar Principalities, peace is rarely found, and even justice must be bought in blood. A new power has risen, hoping to conquer the east with an army of beast men, and only Diran and his companions can stop them.  </p><p>The concluding volume in the critically-acclaimed Blade of the Flame series that follows a former assassin trying to change his life and set the world to right. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Tim Waggoner's novels include <em>Pandora Drive</em> and <em>Like Death</em> (Leisure Books), <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protégé</em> (Black Flame), <em>Godfire: The Orchard of Dreams</em>, <em>Godfire: Heart's Wound</em>, <em>Necropolis</em> (Five Star), <em>Exalted: A Shadow Over Heaven's Eye</em>,_Dark Ages: Gangrel_ (White Wolf), <em>Defender: Hyperswarm</em> (I-Books), and <em>The Harmony Society</em> (Prime Books). He is also the author of the short story collection <em>All Too Surreal</em> (Prime Books). He is the author of two books in the <strong>Dragonlance: The New Adventures</strong> series, <em>Temple of the Dragonslayer </em>and <em>Return of the Sorceress</em> (Mirrorstone), as well as many novels and short stories for teens and adults. He's published close to eighty short stories of horror and fantasy, and his articles on writing have appeared in <em>Writer's Digest</em>, <em>Writers' Journal</em>, and other publications. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. Visit him on the web at www.timwaggoner.com. </p>


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<div><p>The King James Bible translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty's special command, appointed to be read in churches. </p> <p><strong>Features</strong></p> <ul><li>Complete edition - The Old Testament, The New Testament, and Deuterocanonical literature  </li><li>Intuitive navigation.  </li><li>Advanced search function.  </li><li>Open the book you want to read with one click.  </li><li>Includes a glossary of biblical terms.  </li><li>Illustrations by Gustave Doré.  </li><li>Suggested Reading lists with links to texts: Help In Time Of Need, Historical Highlights, Spiritual Standards, Dynamic Doctrines, Practical Concepts </li></ul><p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p> <p><strong>The Old Testament</strong></p> <p>The 5 Books of Moses (The Pentateuch): Genesis | Exodus | Leviticus | Numbers | Deuteronomy </p> <p>History: Joshua | Judges | Ruth | 1 Samuel | 2 Samuel | 1 Kings | 2 Kings | 1 Chronicles | 2 Chronicles | Ezra | Nehemiah | Esther </p> <p>Wisdom &amp; Literature: Job | Psalms | Proverbs | Ecclesiastes | Song of Solomon </p> <p>The Prophets: Isaiah | Jeremiah | Lamentations | Ezekiel | Daniel | Hosea | Joel | Amos | Obadiah | Jonah | Micah | Nahum | Habakkuk | Zephaniah | Haggai | Zechariah | Malachi </p> <p><strong>The New Testament</strong></p> <p>The Life of Jesus and the Early Church: Matthew | Mark | Luke | John | Acts</p> <p>Letters from the Apostle Paul: Romans | 1 Corinthians | 2 Corinthians | Galatians | Ephesians | Philippians | Colossians | 1 Thessalonians | 2 Thessalonians | 1 Timothy | 2 Timothy | Titus | Philemon </p> <p>Other Letters from Apostles and Prophets: Hebrews | James | 1 Peter | 2 Peter | 1 John | 2 John | 3 John | Jude </p> <p>Prophecy: Revelation</p> <p><strong>Deuterocanonical literature</strong></p> <p>Introduction | Additions to Daniel | Judith | Esdras | Additions to Esther | Susanna | 1 Maccabees | 2 Maccabees | 4 Ezra | Prayer of Manassheh | Sirach | Wisdom of Solomon | Baruch (including the Epistle of Jeremiah) | Tobit | Bel</p></div>


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<div><p class="description">EDITORIAL REVIEW:</p>
<p class="description">David Wong has updated the Lovecraft tradition and infused it with humor that rather than lessening the horror, increases it dramatically.  Every time I set the book down down, I was wary that something really was afoot, that there were creatures I couldn't see, and that because I suspected this, I was next. Engaging, comic, and terrifying.-- **Joe Garden**, **Features Editor, The Onion**</p>
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<p class="description">"Wong is like a mash-up of Douglass Adams and Stephen King... 'page-turner' is an understatement."</p>
<p class="description">--**Don Coscarelli**, **director, *Phantasm I-V*, *Bubba Ho-tep***</p>
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<p class="description">"That rarest of things--a genuinely scary story."--**David Wellington**, **author of *Monster Island, Vampire Zero***</p>
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<p class="description">"JOHN DIES AT THE END has a cult following for a reason:  it's horrific, thought-provoking, and hilarious all at once.  This is one of the most entertaining and addictive novels I've ever read."--**Jacob Kier, Publisher, Permuted Press                                     **</p>
<p class="description">**STOP.  **You should not have touched this flyer with your bare hands.  NO, don't put it down. It's too late.  They're watching you.  **My name is David Wong.** My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours.  You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about **the sauce**, about **Korrok**, about the invasion, and the future. But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under **the eye**.  The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.</p>
<p class="description">**The important thing is this:  **The drug is called **Soy Sauce** and it gives users a window into another dimension.  John and I never had the chance to say no.  You still do.   I'm sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very **dark epoch** the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial you keep one thing in mind:   ***None of this was my fault.***</p></div>


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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><em>Stranger in a Strange Land</em>, winner of the 1962 Hugo Award, is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, born during, and the only survivor of, the first manned mission to Mars. Michael is raised by Martians, and he arrives on Earth as a true innocent: he has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth's cultures or religions. But he brings turmoil with him, as he is the legal heir to an enormous financial empire, not to mention <em>de facto</em> owner of the planet Mars. With the irascible popular author Jubal Harshaw to protect him, Michael explores human morality and the meanings of love. He founds his own church, preaching free love and disseminating the psychic talents taught him by the Martians. Ultimately, he confronts the fate reserved for all messiahs.</p><p>The impact of <em>Stranger in a Strange Land</em> was considerable, leading many children of the 60's to set up households based on Michael's water-brother nests. Heinlein loved to pontificate through the mouths of his characters, so modern readers must be willing to overlook the occasional sour note ("Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault."). That aside, <em>Stranger in a Strange Land</em> is one of the master's best entertainments, provocative as he always loved to be. Can you grok it? <em>--Brooks Peck</em></p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>In 1939 Heinlein published his first sf short story and became one of the most prolific and influential authors in the genre. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) is an international best seller and a landmark in more ways than one: it opened the trade best sellers lists to sf writers, breaking down longstanding barriers that will never be seen again. At the same time Stranger became an emblem of the 1960s generation in its iconoclasm and free-love themes. Telling the story of an Earth baby raised by an existing, ancient Martian civilization, the novel often reads as if it were the "Playboy Philosophy" in dialog form. The man/ Martian comes to Earth and broadcasts his ideas by forming his own Church. Heinlein has been rightly criticized for presenting as facts his opinions, which state that organized religion is a sham, authority is generally stupid, young women are all the same, and the common individual is alternately an independent, Ayn Randian-producing genius and the dull-witted part of an ignorant and will-less mob. Yet the book is hard to put down; in its early pages it is a truly masterful sf story. Every library with a fiction collection should have it. Christopher Hurt reads with authority, nicely drawing the characters via barely perceptible changes in intonation, harshness, and pacing. Highly recommended.?Don Wismer, Office of the Secretary of State, Augusta, Me.<br>Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

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<h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>To Emperor Cleon I, the science of psychohistory seems to offer the opportunity to predict and direct the course of his Galactic Empire. To Hari Seldon, discoverer of the still theoretical science, it becomes a nightmare as the young historian becomes the most wanted man in the colonized universe. An intricately twisted plot, uncomplicated but amiable characters, and an abundance of leisurely explication mark Asimov's latest addition to his classic Foundation novels. While familiarity with earlier titles is not necessary, series followers will particularly enjoy this prequel. Recommended.JC<br />Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>For the first time Asimov chronicles the life of Hari Seldon, the man who laid the framework for the universe that came to be known as the Foundation. The long-awaited overture to the greatest science fiction series of all time. "Asimov's storytelling skills have never been keener."--Denver Post. HC: Doubleday. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The late Grand Master of science fiction brings his most famous work, the epic Foundation series, to a posthumous close in this volume. Returning to the format of earlier books in the saga, he presents the story in discrete, novella-length segments, finally grappling with the figure at the center of the entire series: the adult Hari Seldon, creator of psychohistory and father of the Foundation itself (the young Seldon was featured in the previous series novel, Prelude to Foundation ). Here, Seldon confronts various threats to the Empire or to the psychohistory project, thwarting them for the most part by his characteristic brand of informed intuition. In part I, Seldon recognizes the rise of a dangerous anti-Imperial movement led by the charismatic Jo-Jo Joranum, and defuses it while simultaneously backing into the post of First Minister. In the second segment (of five), Seldon narrowly avoids an attempt on his life but cannot prevent the assassination of the Emperor Cleon I. Seldon faces personal as well as political setbacks while civilization crumbles. This volume neatly sews up the series, though it offers few real surprises. Most interesting is the glimpse it affords of Asimov himself, obviously personified in Seldon. The psychohistorian's vast intellectual interest, his concern for the future of learning in a time of decline, and his frustration in the face of mortality, ring true with special poignance. Asimov's fans should savor this final taste of his unique persona. <br />Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>YA-This prequel to the "Foundation" series chronicles the life of Hari Sheldon as he struggles with his developing science of psychohistory in order to secure humanity's survival. It works best when read in conjunction with the previous six titles. However, Asimov has left readers with a fascinating portrayal of a man set against the backdrop of the "rise and fall of the galactic empire." It is well written and peopled with believable characters. Essential for all science-fiction collections.<br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><em>Foundation</em> marks the first of a series of tales set so far in the future that Earth is all but forgotten by humans who live throughout the galaxy. Yet all is not well with the Galactic Empire. Its vast size is crippling to it. In particular, the administrative planet, honeycombed and tunneled with offices and staff, is vulnerable to attack or breakdown. The only person willing to confront this imminent catastrophe is Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian and mathematician. Seldon can scientifically predict the future, and it doesn't look pretty: a new Dark Age is scheduled to send humanity into barbarism in 500 years. He concocts a scheme to save the knowledge of the race in an Encyclopedia Galactica. But this project will take generations to complete, and who will take up the torch after him? The first Foundation trilogy (_Foundation_, <strong>, </strong>) won a Hugo Award in 1965 for "Best All-Time Series." It's science fiction on the grand scale; one of the classics of the field. <em>--Brooks Peck</em></p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future--to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire--both scientists and scholars--and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a fututre generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.  </p><p>But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind's last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun--or fight them and be destroyed. </p>


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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>The Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov are one of the great masterworks of science fiction. Unsurpassed for their unique blend of nonstop action, daring ideas, and extensive world-building, they chronicle the struggle of a courageous group of men and women to preserve humanity’s light against an inexorable tide of darkness and violence.Led by its founding father, the great psychohistorian Hari Seldon, and taking advantage of its superior science and technology, the Foundation has survived the greed and barbarism of its neighboring warrior-planets. Yet now it must face the Empire—still the mightiest force in the Galaxy even in its death throes. When an ambitious general determined to restore the Empire’s glory turns the vast Imperial fleet toward the Foundation, the only hope for the small planet of scholars and scientists lies in the prophecies of Hari Seldon.But not even Hari Seldon could have predicted the birth of the extraordinary creature called The Mule—a mutant intelligence with a power greater than a dozen battle fleets…a power that can turn the strongest-willed human into an obedient slave.</p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels are one of the great masterworks of science fiction. As unsurpassed blend of nonstop action, daring ideas, and extensive world-building, they chronicle the struggle of a courageous group of men and women dedicated to preserving humanity's light in a galaxy plunged into a nightmare of ignorance and violence thirty thousand years long.  </p><p>After years of struggle, the Foundation lies in ruins—destroyed by the mutant mind power of the Mule. But it is rumored that there is a Second Foundation hidden somewhere at the end of the Galaxy, established to preserve the knowledge of mankind through the long centuries of barbarism. The Mule failed to find it the first time—but now he is certain he knows where it lies.  </p><p>The fate of the Foundation rests on young Arcadia Darell, only fourteen years old and burdened with a terrible secret. As its scientists gird for a final showdown with the Mule, the survivors of the First Foundation begin their desperate search. They too want the Second Foundation destroyed…before it destroys them. </p><h3>From the Inside Flap</h3><p>Isaac Asimov's <strong>Foundation</strong> novels are one of the great masterworks of science fiction. As unsurpassed blend of nonstop action, daring ideas, and extensive world-building, they chronicle the struggle of a courageous group of men and women dedicated to preserving humanity's light in a galaxy plunged into a nightmare of ignorance and violence thirty thousand years long.  </p><p>After years of struggle, the Foundation lies in ruins?destroyed by the mutant mind power of the Mule. But it is rumored that there is a Second Foundation hidden somewhere at the end of the Galaxy, established to preserve the knowledge of mankind through the long centuries of barbarism. The Mule failed to find it the first time?but now he is certain he knows where it lies.  </p><p>The fate of the Foundation rests on young Arcadia Darell, only fourteen years old and burdened with a terrible secret. As its scientists gird for a final showdown with the Mule, the survivors of the First Foundation begin their desperate search. They too want the Second Foundation destroyed?before it destroys them. </p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>At last, the costly and bitter war between the two Foundations had come to an end. The scientists of the First Foundation had proved victorious; and now they retum to Hari Seldon's long-established plan to build a new Empire that the Second Foundation is not destroyed after all-and that its still-defiant survivors are preparing their revenge. Now the two exiled citizens of the Foundation-a renegade Councilman and the doddering historian-set out in search of the mythical planet Earth. . .and proof that the Second Foundation still exists. Meanwhile someone-or something-outside of both Foundations sees to be orchestrating events to suit its own ominous purpose. Soon representatives of both the First and Second Foundations will find themselves racing toward a mysterious world called Gaia and a final shocking destiny at the very end of the universe! </p><h3>From the Publisher</h3><p>At last, the costly and bitter war between the two Foundations had come to an end. The scientists of the First Foundation had proved victorious; and now they return to Hari Seldon's long-established plan to build a new Empire that the Second Foundation is not destroyed after all-and that its still-defiant survivors are preparing their revenge. Now the two exiled citizens of the Foundation-a renegade Councilman and the doddering historian-set out in search of the mythical planet Earth. . .and proof that the Second Foundation still exists. Meanwhile someone-or something-outside of both Foundations sees to be orchestrating events to suit its own ominous purpose. Soon representatives of both the First and Second Foundations will find themselves racing toward a mysterious world called Gaia and a final shocking destiny at the very end of the universe! </p>


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SUMMARY:
Gareth Stevens is proud to present a completely updated and revised edition of our highly acclaimed Iassc Asimov's New Library of the Universe. A re-worked text throughout relects the latest discoveries and theories, and the most up-to-the-minute new photographs bring these volumes into the 21st century while mintaining the authority and accessibilty of the original. Asimov's original work forms the basis for a fascinating mixture of science fact and theory combined with his higly readable prose style. The result is a series capable of answering, in an understandable and truly informative way, the multitude of questions children ask when they gae skyward. The 12 revised volumes already in print will soon be joined by 18 more, covering all aspects of the universe and its exploration.


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Quinn ( Dreamer ) won the Turner Tomorrow Award's half-million-dollar first prize for this fascinating and odd book--not a novel by any conventional definition--which was written 13 years ago but could not find a publisher. The unnamed narrator is a disillusioned modern writer who answers a personal ad ("Teacher seeks pupil. . . . Apply in person.") and thereby meets a wise, learned gorilla named Ishmael that can communicate telepathically. The bulk of the book consists entirely of philosophical dialogues between gorilla and man, on the model of Plato's Republic. Through Ishmael, Quinn offers a wide-ranging if highly general examination of the history of our civilization, illuminating the assumptions and philosophies at the heart of many global problems. Despite some gross oversimplifications, Quinn's ideas are fairly convincing; it's hard not to agree that unrestrained population growth and an obsession with conquest and control of the environment are among the key issues of our times. Quinn also traces these problems back to the agricultural revolution and offers a provocative rereading of the biblical stories of Genesis. Though hardly any plot to speak of lies behind this long dialogue, Quinn's smooth style and his intriguing proposals should hold the attention of readers interested in the daunting dilemmas that beset our planet. 50,000 first printing; major ad/promo. <br>Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a literary competition intended to foster works of fiction that present positive solutions to global problems, this book offers proof that good ideas do not necessarily equal good literature. Ishmael, a gorilla rescued from a traveling show who has learned to reason and communicate, uses these skills to educate himself in human history and culture. Through a series of philosophical conversations with the unnamed narrator, a disillusioned Sixties idealist, Ishmael lays out a theory of what has gone wrong with human civilization and how to correct it, a theory based on the tenet that humanity belongs to the planet rather than vice versa. While the message is an important one, Quinn rarely goes beyond a didactic exposition of his argument, never quite succeeding in transforming idea into art. Despite this, heavy publicity should create demand. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/91.<br><em>- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.</em><br>Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

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<div><h3>Review</h3><p>“[Dostoevsky is] at once the most literary and compulsively readable of novelists we continue to regard as great . . . <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> stands as the culmination of his art–his last, longest, richest, and most capacious book. [This] scrupulous rendition can only be welcomed. It returns us to a work we thought we knew, subtly altered and so made new again.” –_Washington Post Book World_  </p><p>“A miracle . . . Every page of the new Karamazov is a permanent standard, and an inspiration.” –_The Times_ (London)  </p><p>“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.” –_New York Times Book Review_  </p><p>“Absolutely faithful . . . Fulfills in remarkable measure most of the criteria for an ideal translation . . . The stylistic accuracy and versatility of registers used . . . bring out the richness and depth of the original in a way similar to a faithful and sensitive restoration of a painting.” –_The Independent_  </p><p>“It may well be that Dostoevsky’s [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now–and through the medium of [this] new translation–beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” –_New York Review of Books_  </p><p>“Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible.” –Joseph Frank, Princeton University  </p><p>With an Introduction by Malcolm V. Jones  </p><p><em>From the Hardcover edition.</em></p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>A new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This acclaimed new English version of Dostoevsky's last novel does justice to all its levels of artistry and intention. </p>

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<p class="description">SUMMARY:<br>In 1880 Dostoevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov, the literary effort for which he had been preparing all his life. Compelling, profound, complex, it is the story of a patricide and of the four sons who each had a motive for murder: Dmitry, the sensualist, Ivan, the intellectual; Alyosha, the mystic; and twisted, cunning Smerdyakov, the bastard child. Frequently lurid, nightmarish, always brilliant, the novel plunges the reader into a sordid love triangle, a pathological obsession, and a gripping courtroom drama. But throughout the whole, Dostoevsky searhes for the truth--about man, about life, about the existence of God. A terrifying answer to man's eternal questions, this monumental work remains the crowning achievement of perhaps the finest novelist of all time.</p>


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<div><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Old pro Haldeman (_Camouflage_) has a gift for seeing issues in a sympathetic but dispassionate perspective, as shown by the 15 tales in this collection. How can we live as human beings in an uncaring universe? he asks. The title story returns to the conclusion of the Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel <em>The Forever War</em> as seen by another character, discovering uncomfortable but ultimately encouraging things about our capacity to adapt and endure. Other selections, such as "Finding My Shadow" and "Civil Disobedience," are much bleaker, as they angrily extrapolate trends in American politics and our abuse of the environment. Set on a far future Earth, "For White Hill" is one of the most memorable tragic love stories ever written as SF. While the book includes a few minor pieces, notably two early stories that contain the basis for <em>Camouflage</em>, Haldeman's work is never less than clever and sometimes much more. <em>(Aug.)</em> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p><em>A Separate War </em>serves both as an introduction to and partial "best-of" collection of the talented Joe Haldeman, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards. Thought provoking, entertaining, witty, and subversive, these stories—while outlandish in plot and premise—never fail to focus on humanity's hopes, dreams, and foibles as they play out during wartime. Critics agree that the best stories in the collection include "Out of Phase," "A Separate War," "For White Hill," and "Finding My Shadow," about racism and germ warfare in Boston. A few, including "Diminished Chord" and "Memento Mori," about nanotechnology, felt lightweight in comparison. If by no means complete, Haldeman's latest collection, notes the <em>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</em>, makes "an ample case for his being considered one of science fiction and fantasies' stalwarts for years to come."</p><p><em>Copyright © 2004 Phillips &amp; Nelson Media, Inc.</em></p>

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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>You can't lose for winning--especially, it would seem, if you're Joe Haldeman. Suffering the same fate as many an author who's dared to pen unconventional sequels to a ferociously loved book (in this case, <strong>), Haldeman has risked the ire of his many devoted admirers a second time (the first sequel was the award-spangled </strong>). But Haldeman's call--not too surprisingly--proves to be a deft one, giving us a book that, while significantly different from its predecessor, turns out to be equally captivating and sensitive, in many ways even more thought-provoking. (Sure, it doesn't match <em>The Forever War</em> for sheer impact, but then again, what does?)</p><p>As in <em>The Forever War</em>, the heart of this story is the dry, ironic bite of fighting-suit vet William Mandella, now middle-aged and a parent (along with his love and comrade-in-arms Marygay) to two teen-aged kids. The family leads a spartan life on the cold and desolate planet Middle Finger, which serves as a sort of genetic safe-deposit box for the current incarnation of humanity, an inhuman race of group-mind clones known as Man. But the animals in the zoo are getting restless, and a core group of vets led by William and Marygay plot an unusual escape: hijacking a reconditioned time ship and using it to take a 40,000 light-year tour (over 10 years of their own time) to rejoin the world they know only after 2,000 generations have passed. Much of the action involves the hatching and fruition of this plot, but Haldeman doesn't really mix things up until nearing the end, when he dissolves physics as we know it and calls down the wrath of God itself. <em>--Paul Hughes</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In this long-awaited sequel to The Forever War, Haldeman describes the postwar life of retired soldiers William and Marygay Mandella on the half-frozen planet Middle Finger, where they and other humans have been secluded by the newly evolved, superhuman race of Man. The long war with the Taurans is over and William and company are little more than relics, kept around to provide archaic genes should the Man ever wish to alter their own, cloned near-perfection. Dissatisfied with their stagnant lives, William and his fellow vets steal a starship. They plan to travel so far and fast that time dilation will allow them to return only a decade older but millennia in their world's future. Disaster strikes just days into their voyage, however, when their antimatter engines mysteriously malfunction in direct violation of the laws of physics. Returning home in escape craft, Mandella and his mates discover that everyone on the planet has disappeared, leaving only their clothes behind. Further, all communication with the outside universe has been cut off. Despite a slow start, Haldeman builds considerable tension with the mystery that confronts his human survivors of what appears to be the complete disappearance of not only humanity, but also of Man and the Taurans. Some truly weird events have occurred and Haldeman gives them a genuinely spooky feel. Mandella's laconic narrative, so effective in getting across The Forever War's antiwar message, proves just as effective in this sequel. The novel is weakened, however, by what feels like an overly hasty conclusion, burdened by Haldeman's decision to invoke not one but two deus ex machinae in the book's final chapters. Still, this is a well-written and worthy sequel to one of SF's enduring classics. (Dec.) FYI: Haldeman's The Forever War (1974) and Forever Peace (1997) each won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best SF novel. <br>Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

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<div><h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>In the 1970s Joe Haldeman approached more than a dozen different publishers before he finally found one interested in <em>The Forever War</em>. The book went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, although a large chunk of the story had been cut out before it saw publication. Now Haldeman and Avon Books have released the definitive version of <em>The Forever War</em>, published for the first time as Haldeman originally intended. The book tells the timeless story of war, in this case a conflict between humanity and the alien Taurans. Humans first bumped heads with the Taurans when we began using collapsars to travel the stars. Although the collapsars provide nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances, the relativistic speeds associated with the process means that time passes slower for those aboard ship. For William Mandella, a physics student drafted as a soldier, that means more than 27 years will have passed between his first encounter with the Taurans and his homecoming, though he himself will have aged only a year. When Mandella finds that he can't adjust to Earth after being gone so long from home, he reenlists, only to find himself shuttled endlessly from battle to battle as the centuries pass. <em>--Craig E. Engler</em></p><h3>Review</h3><p>"To say that <em>The Forever War</em> is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise. It is, for all its techno-extrapolative brilliance, as fine and woundingly genuine a war story as any I've read."<br>--<strong>William Gibson</strong>, author of _Neuromancer, Spook Country  </p><p>_"There are a handful of moments when an American science fiction novel abruptly and seemingly effortlessly satisfied every possible expectation conveyed not only by the genre's ambitions, but of those of the whole literary landscape with which it was contemporary: Sturgeon's <em>More Than Human</em>, Dick's <em>The Man In The High Castle</em>, LeGuin's <em>Dispossessed</em>, Gibson's <em>Neuromancer</em>. <em>The Forever War</em> is one such book, and like those others still carries with it that air of recognition and possibility."<br>--<strong>Jonathan Lethem</strong>, author of _Gun With Occcasional Music, Fortress of Solitude  </p><p>_"Perhaps the most important war novel written since Vietnam . .  . Haldeman, a veteran, is a flat-out visionary . . . and protagonist William Mandella's attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd almost endless war is harrowing hilarious heartbreaking and true  . . . like all the best works of literature THE FOREVER WAR takes you apart and then, before you can turn that last page, puts you back together: better, wiser, more human.  Simply extraordinary." <br>--<strong>Junot Diaz</strong>, Pulitzer Prize winning author of _The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  </p><p>_"If there was a Fort Knox for Science Fiction writers, we'd have to lock Joe Haldeman up."<br>--<strong>Stephen King</strong>, author of _The Shining, The Dead Zone, The Stand  </p><p><em>"</em>The Forever War_ is not just a great Science Fiction novel, it's a great Vietnam war novel - and a great war novel, without qualification- that is also Science Fiction.  A classic to grace either genre."<br>--<strong>Iain M. Banks</strong>, author of _Use of Weapons, The Player of Games, Matter  </p><p>_"FOREVER WAR is brilliant--one of the most influential war novels of our time. That it happens to be set in the future only broadens and enhances its message."<br>--<strong>Greg Bear</strong>, author of _Moving Mars, Eon, The Forge of God  </p><p>_“A parable whose lessons are needful learning once more.”<br>--<strong>John Scalzi</strong>, author of _Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, Zoe’s Tale  </p><p>_"I first read this twenty years ago and have never forgotten the wonder and fury it kindled at the time.  Anyone who talks about the glory of war has obviously never read it.  A beautifully detailed and intensely personal account of a conflict which lasts for over a thousand years, as told by one grunt who lives through it all.  Only a writer as skillfull and knowledgeable as Haldeman could use war's dark glamour to lure the reader in and then deplou the sam fascination to show just what kind of effect this orchestrated barbarism can have on the human soul."<br>--<strong>Peter F. Hamilton</strong>, author of _Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained, The Dreaming Void  </p><p>_“In a literature of ideas, <em>The Forever War</em> is a titan: a book filled with mind-bending ideas about relatavistic time-distortion and world-shaking ideas about the futility of war. In today's world, where we think declaring war on abstract nouns like TERROR is a winning strategy, we need THE FOREVER WAR."<br>--<strong>Cory Doctorow</strong>, author of _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother X  </p><p>_“It is to the Vietnam War what <em>Catch-22</em> was to World War II, the definitive, bleakly comic satire.”<br>--<strong>Thomas M. Disch</strong>, author of _Camp<strong> Concentration</strong>, 334  </p><p><em>"</em>The Forever War_ does what the very best science fiction does. It deals with extremes both societal and teleological; it places a frame around humankind's place in the universe to show us what is outside the frame; and it functions simultaneously at the literal and metaphorical level.  Inarguably one of the genre's great novels, it is also among the finest novels ever written about war."<br>--<strong>James Sallis</strong>, author of <em>The Long Legged Fly, Drive, Cripple Creek</em></p>

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