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How To Stay Married
by Jilly Cooper OBE'There is no one else like Cooper' GuardianWhen Jilly Cooper, then a young Sunday Times journalist, was asked to write a book on marriage, she had been married to Leo Cooper for a mere seven years. In this 2011 reissue of that book, they were celebrating their Golden Wedding, and although the institution of marriage has changed a great deal since this book was first written, much of Jilly's advice - frank, fearless, often hilarious, but always wise - still holds good.From the wedding and the honeymoon to life afterwards, including how to deal with the in-laws and how to tell if your other half is having an affair, she dispenses anecdotes, jokes, common sense and endless optimism and fun.Whether you are contemplating marriage, living together, or have been married as long as Jilly and Leo were, you will plenty of good advice and humour in How to Stay Married.Everybody loves Jilly Cooper:'Joyful and mischievous' Jojo Moyes'A delight from start to finish' Daily Mail'Fun, sexy and unputdownable' Marian Keyes'Flawlessly entertaining' Helen Fielding
Ten Hag: The Biography
by Maarten Meijer'A superb biography'The Times'Meijer's portrait is definitive'iNews'Ten Hag may just be the man to bring the glory days back'Daily StarWho is Erik ten Hag? Calm and cool-headed, he ignores critics, follows his own methods and relentlessly pursues perfection on the pitch. His uncanny ability to analyse and solve problems - the 'process' as Ten Hag calls it - has unfailingly led to breakthrough. There is no magic. There is only intelligence at work, personal devotion to players and near-obsessive attention to detail.At Ajax, Ten Hag brooked no dissent and moulded his team into a smoothly operating unit of attack. His team enjoyed an astonishing run, winning three league cups in a row and reaching the Champions League semi-finals for the first time in a quarter of a century. Along the way, they produced some of the brightest and most entertaining football seen in Europe for years. And throughout his first season at Manchester United, he has more than made his mark. He's brought a winning spirit to the club and silverware back to the trophy cabinet.Maarten Meijer's definitive biography follows Erik ten Hag, from his upbringing in the Dutch countryside to his domestic triumphs and European victories. Meijer's book is the ultimate guide to the man with the momentous task of beginning a new era of great and winning football.
Super Ghost: From the hilarious bestselling authors of Kid Normal
by Greg James Chris SmithOrdinary Kids. Extraordinary Adventures. Laughs for the Whole Family.'Action-packed, hilarious and EPIC!' Annabel Steadman, author of SKANDAR AND THE UNICORN THIEFAn epic superhero adventure with a twist from Radio 1 broadcasters and bestselling authors of KID NORMAL and THE GREAT DREAM ROBBERY.Do you like superheroes? Do you like pandas? Do you like really brilliant adventures? Then this is the book for you!When world famous superhero Dr Extraordinary gets blown up inside a giant robot, twelve-year-old Sonny Nelson is devastated. A world without heroes is totally rubbish!But things take an even more extraordinary turn when Dr Ex returns and is invisible to everyone except Sonny!Readers LOVE The Great Dream Robbery:'I wanna be a member of the Dream Bandits!''Escapist and daft and just a whole lot of fun''Thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to crazy end''This madcap adventure could have only been dreamt up by the crazy minds of Greg James and Chris Smith - part science-fiction, part mission impossible, part mystery that needs solving and a whole lot of fun'
My Mother's Kitchen: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and the Meaning of Life
by Peter GethersMy Mother's Kitchen is a funny, moving memoir about a son’s discovery that his mother has a genius for understanding the intimate connections between cooking, people and lovePeter Gethers wants to give his aging mother a very personal and perhaps final gift: a spectacular feast featuring all her favorite dishes. The problem is, although he was raised to love food and wine he doesn’t really know how to cook. So he embarks upon an often hilarious and always touching culinary journey that will ultimately allow him to bring his mother’s friends and loved ones to the table one last time. The daughter of a restaurateur—the restaurant was New York’s legendary Ratner’s—Judy Gethers discovered a passion for cooking in her 50s. In time, she became a mentor and friend to several of the most famous chefs in America, including Wolfgang Puck, Nancy Silverton and Jonathan Waxman; she also wrote many cookbooks and taught cooking alongside Julia Child. In her 80s, she was robbed of her ability to cook by a debilitating stroke. But illness has brought her closer than ever to her son: Peter regularly visits her so they can share meals, and he can ask questions about her colorful past, while learning her kitchen secrets. Gradually his ambition becomes manifest: he decides to learn how to cook his mother the meal of her dreams and thereby tell the story of her life to all those who have loved her.With his trademark wit and knowing eye, Peter Gethers has written an unforgettable memoir about how food and family can do much more than feed us—they can nourish our souls.
Supersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (Novels Of The Jet Age Ser.)
by Walter J. BoyneFrom the first flight of the U-2 to the flashing speed of the famous SR-71 Blackbird, Supersonic Thunder is a portrait of the jet as it comes of age. Aviation genius is personified in famous engineers such as Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich and in test pilots like Tony LeVier and Tex Johnson in this fast moving story of military and commercial jet aviation.Under the guidance of test pilot and engineer, Vance Shannon, the reader is present at every major event in jet aviation in the 1960s and 1970s. As the ever-changing industry begins to speed up beyond Vance's grasp, he turns to his two sons, Tom and Harry, to keep the family business on the cutting edge. Though they've followed in their fathers' footsteps for many years, the stress from trying to stay ahead of the curve is destroying their families--as well as fueling a long hidden rivalry between the two brothers. As the Shannon family struggles with their personal and professional lives, Supersonic Thunder reveals the great leaps of the aviation industry during this astonishing era, from Gary Powers' U-2 shoot down to the first flight of the Russian Supersonic Transport. With historic and dramatic detail, we are taken behind the scenes, revealing the motivations of top Russian, English, and American designers as they push the limits of engines and airframes and confront the difficulties of the pursuit of Mach 2.0 speeds. From the luxury of the 747 to the abject despair of a cell in the Hanoi Hilton, Supersonic Thunder tells the real story of this amazing chapter of jet aviation in terms of the men and women who lived and died to make it a part of our everyday life. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures
by Kyoko MoriTwelve essays by a Japanese-American writer about being caught between past and present, old country and new.In this powerful, exquisitely crafted book, Kyoko Mori delves into her dual heritage with a rare honesty that is both graceful and stirring. From her unhappy childhood in Japan, weighted by a troubled family and a constricting culture, to the American Midwest, where she found herself free to speak as a strong-minded independent woman, though still an outsider, Mori explores the different codes of silence, deference, and expression that govern Japanese and American women's lives: the ties that bind us to family and the lies that keep us apart; the rituals of mourning that give us the courage to accept death; the images of the body that make sex seem foreign to Japanese women and second nature to Americans. In the sensitive hands of this compelling writer, one woman's life becomes the mirror of two profoundly different societies.
Dreaming in Chocolate: A Novel
by Susan Bishop Crispell“Come for the life-changing chocolates and opinionated apothecary table, stay for the enchanting eight-year old and complicated secrets." —Amy Reichert, author of The Coincidence of Coconut CakeWith an endless supply of magical gifts and recipes from the hot chocolate café Penelope Dalton runs alongside her mother, she is able to give her daughter almost everything she wants. The one sticking point is Ella’s latest request: get a dad. And not just any dad. Ella has her sights set on Noah Gregory, her biological father who’s back in town for a few months – and as charming as ever.Noah broke Penelope’s heart years ago, but now part of her wonders if she made the right decision to keep the truth of their daughter from him. The other, more practical part, is determined to protect Ella from the same heartbreak. Now Penelope must give in to her fate or face a future of regrets.Dreaming in Chocolate by Susan Bishop Crispell is a heartwarming story of love, hot chocolate, and one little girl’s wish for her mother.
The House of Brides: A Novel
by Jane CockramJane Cockram makes her thrilling debut with this page-turning tale of psychological suspense in which a young woman whose life is in tatters flees to the safety of a family estate in England, but instead of comfort finds chilling secrets and lies.Miranda’s life and career has been a roller-coaster ride. Her successful rise to the top of the booming lifestyle industry as a social media influencer led to a humiliating fall after a controversial product she endorsed flopped. Desperate to get away from the hate-spewing trolls shaming her on the internet, she receives a mysterious letter from a young cousin in England that plunges her into a dark family mystery. Miranda’s mother Tessa Summers, a famous author, died when Miranda was a child. The young woman’s only connection to the Summers family is through Tessa’s famous book The House of Brides—a chronicle of the generations of women who married into the infamous Summers family and made their home in the rambling Barnsley House, the family’s estate. From Gertrude Summers, a famed crime novelist, to Miranda’s grandmother Beatrice, who killed herself after setting fire to Barnsley while her children slept, each woman in The House of Brides is more notorious than the next. The house’s current “bride” is the beautiful, effervescent Daphne, her Uncle Max’s wife—a famed celebrity chef who saved Barnsley from ruin turning the estate into an exclusive culinary destination and hotel.Curious about this legendary family she has never met, Miranda arrives at Barnsley posing as a prospective nanny answering an advertisement. She’s greeted by the compelling yet cold housekeeper Mrs. Mins, and meets the children and her Uncle Max—none of whom know her true identity. But Barnsley is not what Miranda expected. The luxury destination and award-winning restaurant is gone, and Daphne is nowhere to be found. Most disturbing, one of the children is in a wheelchair after a mysterious accident. What happened in this house? Where is Daphne? What darkness lies hidden in Barnsley?
Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri
by Jamie JamesA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice"Pagan Light is mesmerizing. Every detail is compelling. I felt I was reading a family history of a family far more interesting than mine." --Edmund White, author of Our Young ManA rich, intimate embrace of Capri, which was a magnet for artistic renegades and a place of erotic refugeIsolated and arrestingly beautiful, the island of Capri has been a refuge for renegade artists and writers fleeing the strictures of conventional society from the time of Augustus, who bought the island in 29 BC after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, to the early twentieth century, when the poet and novelist Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen was in exile there after being charged with corrupting minors, to the 1960s, when Truman Capote spent time on the island. We also meet the Marquis de Sade, Goethe, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Compton Mackenzie, Rilke, Lenin, and Gorky, among other astonishingly vivid characters. Grounded in a deep intimacy with Capri and full of captivating anecdotes, Jamie James’s Pagan Light tells how a tiny island served as a wildly permissive haven for people—queer, criminal, sick, marginalized, and simply crazy—who had nowhere else to go.
Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel
by Shahnaz HabibWinner of the New American Voices AwardLonglisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals of ExcellenceThis witty personal and cultural history of travel from the perspective of a Third World-raised woman of color, Airplane Mode, asks: what does it mean to be a joyous traveler when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change?The conditions of travel have long been dictated by the color of passports and the color of skin.The color of one&’s skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience.Threaded through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, the idea of wanderlust itself. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism—but as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.
Saint Maybe
by Anne TylerNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author brings us the story of Ian Bedloe, the ideal teenage son, leading a cheery, apple-pie life with his family in Baltimore. That is, until a careless and vicious rumor leads to a devastating tragedy. Imploding from guilt, Ian believes he is the one responsible for the tragedy. No longer a star athlete with a bright future, and desperately searching for salvation, he stumbles across a storefront with a neon sign that simply reads: CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE. Ian has always viewed his penance as a burden. But through the power of faith and the love of family, he begins to view it as a gift. After years spent trying to atone for his foolish mistakes, Ian finds forgiveness and peace in the life he builds for himself.
The Accidental Tourist: A Novel
by Anne TylerNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author—an irresistible novel exploring the slippery alchemy of attracting opposites, and the struggle to rebuild one&’s life after unspeakable tragedyTravel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine. Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer too optimistic to let Macon disappear into himself. Despite Macon&’s best efforts to remain insulated, Muriel up-ends his solitary, systemized life, catapulting him into the center of a messy, beautiful love story he never imagined. A fresh and timeless tale of unexpected bliss, The Accidental Tourist showcases Tyler&’s talents for making characters—and their relationships—feel both real and magical.&“Incandescent, heartbreaking, exhilarating…One cannot reasonably expect fiction to be much better than this.&” —The Washington Post
Americanah: A novel
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie10th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America—and the search for what it means to call a place home. • From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Half of a Yellow Sun • WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR "An expansive, epic love story."—O, The Oprah Magazine One of the New York Times&’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic&’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsIfemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post–9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel that is "dazzling…funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise." —San Francisco Chronicle
Dark Demon (A Carpathian Novel #16)
by Christine FeehanA female vampire slayer proves as seductive—and mysterious—as the night dwellers she stalks in this novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling Carpathian series.For as long as she can remember, Natalya has been fighting demons: first in the form of childhood nightmares, then later, immortal creatures that kill and prey on the innocent—including her own twin brother. Whether Carpathian or vampire, she slays those who murder by night, and has no equal—until she is seduced by the very thing she considers her enemy...A Carpathian who has seen nearly everything in his endless existence, Vikirnoff didn&’t think he could be surprised anymore—until he faces a woman who rivals him as a vampire hunter. A formidable and gifted warrior in her own right, Natalya has a nature that is strangely familiar—yet alien—to his own. Who is this mysterious female who fears no one—not even him? Natalya could be the key to the survival of the Carpathians, but all Vikirnoff is certain of is that she is the key to his heart and soul...
Free Men: A Novel
by Katy Simpson SmithFrom the author of the highly acclaimed The Story of Land and Sea comes a captivating novel, set in the late eighteenth-century American South, that follows a singular group of companions—an escaped slave, a white orphan, and a Creek Indian—who are being tracked down for murder.In 1788, three men converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama. Cat, an emotionally scarred white man from South Carolina, is on the run after abandoning his home. Bob is a talkative black man fleeing slavery on a Pensacola sugar plantation, Istillicha, edged out of his Creek town’s leadership, is bound by honor to seek retribution.In the few days they spend together, the makeshift trio commits a shocking murder that soon has the forces of the law bearing down upon them. Sent to pick up their trail, a probing French tracker named Le Clerc must decide which has a greater claim: swift justice, or his own curiosity about how three such disparate, desperate men could act in unison.Katy Simpson Smith skillfully brings into focus men whose lives are both catastrophic and full of hope—and illuminates the lives of the women they left behind. Far from being anomalies, Cat, Bob, and Istillicha are the beating heart of the new America that Le Clerc struggles to comprehend. In these territories caught between European, American, and Native nations, a wilderness exists where four men grapple with the importance of family, the stain of guilt, and the competing forces of power, love, race, and freedom—questions that continue to haunt us today.
The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food
by Ted GenowaysA powerful and important work of investigative journalism that explores the runaway growth of the American meatpacking industry and its dangerous consequences“A worthy update to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and a chilling indicator of how little has changed since that 1906 muckraking classic.” — Mother Jones“I tore through this book. . . . Books like these are important: They track the journey of our thinking about food, adding evidence and offering guidance along the way.” —Wall Street JournalOn the production line in American packing-houses, there is one cardinal rule: the chain never slows. Under pressure to increase supply, the supervisors of meat-processing plants have routinely accelerated the pace of conveyors, leading to inhumane conditions, increased accidents, and food of questionable, often dangerous quality.In The Chain, acclaimed journalist Ted Genoways uses the story of Hormel Foods and its most famous product, Spam—a recession-era staple—to probe the state of the meatpacking industry, from Minnesota to Iowa to Nebraska. Interviewing scores of line workers, union leaders, hog farmers, and local politicians and activists, Genoways reveals an industry pushed to its breaking point—while exposing alarming new trends, from sick or permanently disabled workers to conflict between small towns and immigrant labor. A searching exposé in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson, and Eric Schlosser, The Chain is a mesmerizing story and an urgent warning about the hidden costs of the food we eat.
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
by Ben Lindbergh Sam MillerThe New York Times bestseller about what would happen if two statistics-minded outsiders were allowed to run a professional baseball team.It’s the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies -- with real players, in a real ballpark, in a real playoff race. That’s what baseball analysts Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller got to do when an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, offered them the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics. Their story in The Only Rule is it Has to Work is unlike any other baseball tale you've ever read.We tag along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their number-crunching insights to all aspects of assembling and running a team, following one cardinal rule for judging each innovation they try: it has to work. We meet colorful figures like general manager Theo Fightmaster and boundary-breakers like the first openly gay player in professional baseball. Even José Canseco makes a cameo appearance.Will their knowledge of numbers help Lindbergh and Miller bring the Stompers a championship, or will they fall on their faces? Will the team have a competitive advantage or is the sport’s folk wisdom true after all? Will the players attract the attention of big-league scouts, or are they on a fast track to oblivion?It’s a wild ride, by turns provocative and absurd, as Lindbergh and Miller tell a story that will speak to numbers geeks and traditionalists alike. And they prove that you don’t need a bat or a glove to make a genuine contribution to the game.
Ketchup Is a Vegetable: And Other Lies Moms Tell Themselves
by Robin O'BryantIf you don't have anything nice to say about motherhood, then… read this book. Robin O'Bryant offers a no holds barred look at the day to day life of being a mother to three, running a household and the everyday monotony of parenting. It's not always pretty but it's real. Whether she's stuffing cabbage in her bra… dealing with defiant yet determined daughters… yelling at the F.B.I... or explaining the birds and the bees to her preschooler… you're sure to find dozens of humorous and relatable situations. From the creator of Robin's Chicks, one of the South's most popular blogs on motherhood, misunderstandings and musings, comes a collection of essays that will not only make you laugh and cry, but realize that you're not alone in your journey.Sit back and relax, pour yourself some "mommy juice," throw a fresh diaper on your baby and deadbolt the bedroom door to keep your kids out… because once you start reading you'll be too busy wiping away tears of laughter to wipe anybody's butt.
Strom Thurmond's America: A History
by Joseph Crespino"Do not forget that ‘skill and integrity' are the keys to success." This was the last piece of advice on a list Will Thurmond gave his son Strom in 1923. The younger Thurmond would keep the words in mind throughout his long and colorful career as one of the South's last race-baiting demagogues and as a national power broker who, along with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, was a major figure in modern conservative politics.But as the historian Joseph Crespino demonstrates in Strom Thurmond's America, the late South Carolina senator followed only part of his father's counsel. Political skill was the key to Thurmond's many successes; a consummate opportunist, he had less use for integrity. He was a thoroughgoing racist—he is best remembered today for his twenty-four-hour filibuster in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957—but he fathered an illegitimate black daughter whose existence he did not publicly acknowledge during his lifetime. A onetime Democrat and labor supporter, he switched parties in 1964 and helped to dismantle New Deal protections for working Americans.If Thurmond was a great hypocrite, though, he was also an innovator who saw the future of conservative politics before just about anyone else. As early as the 1950s, he began to forge alliances with Christian Right activists, and he eagerly took up the causes of big business, military spending, and anticommunism. Crespino's adroit, lucid portrait reveals that Thurmond was, in fact, both a segregationist and a Sunbelt conservative. The implications of this insight are vast. Thurmond was not a curiosity from a bygone era, but rather one of the first conservative Republicans we would recognize as such today. Strom Thurmond'sAmerica is about how he made his brand of politics central to American life.
Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce
by Constance RosenblumA sparkling biography of the original blonde whom gentlemen preferred, a woman who made a career of marrying millionaires and became the first tabloid celebrity.One of America's most talked about personalities during the Jazz Age, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was the quintessential gold digger, the real-life Lorelei Lee. Married six times, to several millionaires and even a count, Joyce had no discernible talent except self-promotion. A barber's daughter from Norfolk, Virginia, who rose to become a Ziegfeld Girl and, briefly, a movie star, Joyce was the precursor of the modern celebrity-a person famous for being famous. Her scandalous exploits-spending a million dollars in a week, conducting torrid love affairs with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Walter Chrysler-were irresistible to the new breed of tabloid journalists in search of sensation and to audiences hungry for the possibilities her life seemed to promise.Joyce's march across Broadway, Hollywood, and the nation's front pages was only slowed by the true nemesis of the glamour girl: old age. She died in 1957, alone and forgotten-until now. In prose as vibrant as its subject, Constance Rosenblum's Gold Digger brings to life the woman who singularly epitomized this confident and hedonistic era.
Stories from a Moron: Real Stories Rejected by Real Magazines
by Ed BrothA nutty and hilarious book of magazine submissions and letters to and from the editors by the comedian, former Seinfeld writer, and Bee Movie cowriter.Foreword by Jerry SeinfeldEd writes short stories. He’s prolific. And desperate to get published. But he sends his stories to the wrong magazines. As for the magazines? Well, they don’t mind telling him so:“As a word of advice, it always helps for writers to be familiar with the publications they submit material to.” —Fencers Quarterly Magazine“Dear Ed: Thank you for your recent submission to Steamboat Magazine; it was wonderful to hear how much our magazine has touched you . . .”“Dear Mr. Broth: Thank you for the opportunity to review your article, ‘My Car Ride with Daddy,’ for possible publication in Mushing . . .”With this book, Ed Broth finally sees his work published. His “Stories of Hope & Inspiration” and his “Stories of Meaning & Sacrament” plus his passionate pitches to place his writing in our nation’s premier publications—from Pest Control Magazine to Arthritis Today—are all to be found in the book you hold in your hands.Some might have advised Ed not to send his story “I Love Dogs” to I Love Cats Magazine or to stop submitting revised stories to editors who have already turned them down. But, well, that’s just not the way Ed’s mind works. Studded like a rich cranberry strudel with nuggets of genius—from cartoons and advertisements to Ed’s newspaper articles from across the country—Stories from a Moron is an addictive journey into the mind of a great talent.
Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony
by Robert RubyThe true story of how the first English colony in the New World was lost to history, then found again three hundred years later.England's first attempt at colonizing the New World was not at Roanoke or Jamestown, but on a mostly frozen small island in the Canadian Arctic. Queen Elizabeth I called that place Meta Incognita -- the Unknown Shore. Backed by Elizabeth I and her key advisors, including the legendary spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and the shadowy Dr. John Dee, the erstwhile pirate Sir Martin Frobisher set out three times across the North Atlantic, in the process leading what is still the largest Arctic expedition in history. In this forbidding place, Frobisher believed he had discovered vast quantities of gold, the fabled Northwest Passage to the riches of Cathay, and a suitable place for a year-round colony. But Frobisher's dream turned into a nightmare, and his colony was lost to history for nearly three centuries.In this brilliantly conceived dual narrative, Robert Ruby interweaves Frobisher's saga with that of the nineteenth-century American Charles Francis Hall, whose explorations of this same landscape enabled him to hear the oral history of the Inuit, passed down through generations. It was these stories that unlocked the mystery of Frobisher's lost colony.Unknown Shore is the story of two men's travels, and of what these men shared three centuries apart. Ultimately, it is a tale of men driven by greed and ambition, of the hard labor of exploration, of the Inuit and their land, and of great gambles gone wrong.
Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People
by Barry C. LynnBarry C. Lynn, one of America's preeminent thinkers, provides the clearest statement yet on the nature and magnitude of the political and economic dangers posed by America’s new monopolies in Liberty from All Masters."Very few thinkers in recent years have done more to shift the debate in Washington than Barry Lynn."—Franklin Foer Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state, and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read “You ain’t the boss of me.”Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century—in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. The result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want. The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon—designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions—is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think.
Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program
by Stephen GreyFor the first time, Stephen Grey tells the inside story of international prisons sanctioned by the U.S. Government and used by the CIA to hold and torture people suspected of terrorism. Using contacts deep inside the U.S. Government, Grey reveals how deeply the Bush administration is involved in the program and questions the truth of statements made by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. He also shines a spotlight on the heads of European nations who turned a blind eye to the program when it showed up in their back yards. Grey takes an unflinching look at a horrendous practice that scorns Geneva Convention rules and is powered by corruption at the highest levels of governments worldwide. Through his unprecedented access to CIA flight records and dozens of sources at the senior levels of the current administration, Grey has produced a story of flight plans, extreme torture, and the clash of religions and governmental posturing that goes on today. Ghost Plane tells the stories of individuals abducted at airports around the world and transported for interrogation and torture on a fleet of leased planes manned by CIA operatives. Grey paints a disburing ethical picture of the war on terror and lays the responsibility for abduction and torutre at the doorstep of Washington, D.C.
The Last Green Tree
by Jim GrimsleyJim Grimsley's previous science fiction novel, The Ordinary, was named one of the Top Ten science fiction books of the year by Booklist and won the Lambda Literary Award. His novels and short stories have been favorably compared to those of Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Vance, and Samuel R. Delany. Now Grimsley returns to the richly complex milieu of The Ordinary with a gripping tale of magic, science, and an epic clash between godlike forces.Three hundred years have passed since the Conquest, and the Great Mage rules over all of humanity, even as cybernetic links connect the varied worlds of the empire. Vast Gates allow travel from one planet to another, across unimaginable distances. Choirs of chanting priests maintain order, their songs subtly shaping reality, while the armies of the empire have known nothing but total victory for centuries.But on the planet Aramen, where sentient trees keep human symbionts as slaves, a power has arisen that may rival that of the Great Mage himself. Hordes of unnatural creatures rampage across the planet, leaving death and destruction in their wake. An inhuman intelligence, cruel and implacable, meets the priests' sung magic with a strange new music of its own. The Anilyn Gate is shut down, cutting off Aramen from the rest of humanity. The long era of peace is over.Now a handful of traumatized survivors must venture deep into a hostile wilderness on a desperate mission to uncover the source of the enemy's powers. And the future of the universe may depend on the untested abilities of one damaged child. . . .The Last Green Tree is a worthy successor to The Ordinary and a compelling saga in its own right.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.