RH Free books 11/2013

ROUGH JUSTICE

By Alex Ross
Chip Kidd

ISBN: 9780307378781

Rating: 4.24 by 2 users

Description

**NOW IN PAPERBACK, WITH COLOR AND BLACK-AND-WHITE DRAWINGS THROUGHOUT**

Alex Ross opens his private sketchbooks to reveal his astonishing pencil and ink drawings of DC Comics characters, nearly all of them appearing in print here for the first time in paperback.

Thousands of fans from around the world have thrilled to Alex’s fully rendered photo-realistic paintings of their favorite heroes, but, as they may not realize, all of those works start as pencil on paper, and the origins of the finished images are rarely seen—until now.

From deleted scenes and altered panels for the epic Kingdom Come saga to proposals for revamping such classic properties as Batgirl, Captain Marvel, and an imagined son of Batman named Batboy, to unused alternate comic book cover ideas for the monthly Superman and Batman comics of 2008–2009, there is much to surprise and delight those who thought they already knew all of Alex’s DC Comics work.

Illuminating everything is the artist’s own commentary, written expressly for this book, explaining his thought processes and stylistic approaches for the various riffs and reimaginings of characters we thought we knew everything about but whose possibilities we didn’t fully understand.

As a record of a pivotal era in comics history, Rough Justice is a must-have for Alex’s legion of fans, as well as for anyone interested in masterly comic book imagination and illustration.

JIM HENSON: THE WORKS

By Christopher Finch
Jim Henson
Justine Strasberg
Candice Bergen
Harry Belafonte
Frank Oz

ISBN: 9780679412038

Rating: 4.48 by 423 users

Description

The ultimate gift for Muppet lovers everywhere, this extraordinary tribute celebrates 40 years of Henson's creative genius--from his best-known inventions to his lesser known but equally fascinating notions for everything from designs for futuristic nightclubs and homes to experimental films. 500 color illus.

GLITTERING IMAGES

By Camille Paglia

ISBN: 9780375424601

Rating: 3.88 by 199 users

Description

From the best-selling author of Sexual Personae and Break, Blow, Burn and one of our most acclaimed cultural critics, here is an enthralling journey through Western art’s defining moments, from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Queen Nefertari to George Lucas’s volcano planet duel in Revenge of the Sith.

America’s premier intellectual provocateur returns to the subject that brought her fame, the great themes of Western art. Passionately argued, brilliantly written, and filled with Paglia’s trademark audacity, Glittering Images takes us on a tour through more than two dozen seminal images, some famous and some obscure or unknown—paintings, sculptures, architectural styles, performance pieces, and digital art that have defined and transformed our visual world. She combines close analysis with background information that situates each artist and image within its historical context—from the stone idols of the Cyclades to an elegant French rococo interior to Jackson Pollock’s abstract Green Silver to Renée Cox’s daring performance piece Chillin’ with Liberty. And in a stunning conclusion, she declares that the avant-garde tradition is dead and that digital pioneer George Lucas is the world’s greatest living artist. Written with energy, erudition, and wit, Glittering Images is destined to change the way we think about our high-tech visual environment.

INVENTOR AND THE TYCOON, THE

By Edward Ball

ISBN: 9780767929400

Rating: 3.20 by 0 users

Description

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.

One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media sensation. His patron was railroad tycoon (and former California governor) Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Stanford hired Muybridge and his camera to answer that question. And between them, the murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media.

Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor interweaves Muybridge's quest to unlock the secrets of motion through photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. A tale from the great American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth, and sinister ingenuity.

WOLF OF WALL STREET, THE

By Jordan Belfort

ISBN: 9780553384772

Rating: 3.63 by 74 users

Description

Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids waiting at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called . . .

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess that no one could invent.

Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits—for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.

From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down . . .

Praise for The Wolf of Wall Street

“Raw and frequently hilarious.”—The New York Times

“A rollicking tale of [Jordan Belfort’s] rise to riches as head of the infamous boiler room Stratton Oakmont . . . proof that there are indeed second acts in American lives.”—Forbes

“A cross between Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Scorsese’s GoodFellas . . . Belfort has the Midas touch.”—The Sunday Times (London)

“Entertaining as pulp fiction, real as a federal indictment . . . a hell of a read.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Hardcover edition.

DECODED

By Jay-Z

ISBN: 9780812981155

Rating: 3.76 by 46 users

Description

Expanded paperback edition of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller features 16 pages of new material, including 3 new songs decoded.

Decoded is a book like no other: a collection of lyrics and their meanings that together tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history, and one of the most provocative and successful artists of our time.

WILD TALES

By Graham Nash

ISBN: 9780385347549

Rating: 3.79 by 18 users

Description

From Graham Nash--the legendary musician and founding member of the iconic bands Crosby, Stills & Nash and The Hollies--comes a candid and riveting autobiography that belongs on the reading list of every classic rock fan.
Graham Nash's songs defined a generation and helped shape the history of rock and roll--he's written over 200 songs, including such classic hits as "Carrie Anne," "On A Carousel," "Simple Man," "Our House," "Marrakesh Express," and "Teach Your Children." From the opening salvos of the British Rock Revolution to the last shudders of Woodstock, he has rocked and rolled wherever music mattered. Now Graham is ready to tell his story: his lower-class childhood in post-war England, his early days in the British Invasion group The Hollies; becoming the lover and muse of Joni Mitchell during the halcyon years, when both produced their most introspective and important work; meeting Stephen Stills and David Crosby and reaching superstardom with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; and his enduring career as a solo musician and political activist. Nash has valuable insights into a world and time many think they know from the outside but few have experienced at its epicenter, and equally wonderful anecdotes about the people around him: the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, Cass Elliot, Dylan, and other rock luminaries. From London to Laurel Canyon and beyond, "Wild Tales" is a revealing look back at an extraordinary life--with all the highs and the lows; the love, the sex, and the jealousy; the politics; the drugs; the insanity--and the sanity--of a magical era of music.

"From the Hardcover edition."

JIM HENSON

By Brian Jay Jones

ISBN: 9780345526113

Rating: 4.18 by 412 users

Description

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

For the first time ever—a comprehensive biography of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative creative artists: the incomparable, irreplaceable Jim Henson

He was a gentle dreamer whose genial bearded visage was recognized around the world, but most people got to know him only through the iconic characters born of his fertile imagination: Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Miss Piggy, Big Bird. The Muppets made Jim Henson a household name, but they were just part of his remarkable story.

This extraordinary biography—written with the generous cooperation of the Henson family—covers the full arc of Henson’s all-too-brief life: from his childhood in Leland, Mississippi; through the years of burgeoning fame in Washington D.C., New York, and London; to the decade of international celebrity that preceded his untimely death at age fifty-three. Drawing on hundreds of hours of new interviews with Henson's family, friends, and closest collaborators, as well as unprecedented access to private family and company archives (including never-before-seen interviews, business documents, and Henson’s private letters), Brian Jay Jones explores the creation of the Muppets, Henson’s contributions to Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, and his nearly ten-year campaign to bring The Muppet Show to television. Jones provides the imaginative context for Henson’s non-Muppet projects, including the richly imagined worlds of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth—as well as fascinating misfires like Henson’s dream of opening an inflatable psychedelic nightclub or staging an elaborate all-puppet Broadway show.

An uncommonly intimate portrait, Jim Henson captures all the facets of this American original: the master craftsman who revolutionized the presentation of puppets on television, the savvy businessman whose dealmaking prowess won him a reputation as “the new Walt Disney,” and the creative team leader whose collaborative ethos earned him the undying loyalty of everyone who worked for him. Here also is insight into Henson’s intensely private personal life: his Christian Science upbringing; his love of fast cars, high-stakes gambling, and expensive art; and his weakness for women. Though an optimist by nature, Henson was haunted by the notion that he would not have time to do all the things he wanted to do in life—a fear that his heartbreaking final hours would prove all too well founded.

An up-close look at the charmed life of a legend, Jim Henson gives the full measure to a man whose joyful genius transcended age, language, geography, and culture—and continues to beguile audiences worldwide.

Praise for Jim Henson

One of "This Fall's Hottest Biographies” — Kirkus Reviews
One of "Ten Hot Fall Reads" — The Hollywood Reporter

“Illuminating . . . As Jones expertly shows, Henson remained throughout his life an artist who was continuously in motion, conceiving, pitching, and managing multiple projects at once.” – The Atlantic

“Consistently surprises . . . Highly readable and never long-winded (even at nearly 600 pages), Jim Henson joyously documents its subject’s knack for combining old-fashioned puppetry with the world’s newest entertainment medium to forge a kind of furry, felt-covered vaudeville.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Compulsively readable . . . evocative . . . Much has been written about Henson—during his life and after—but nothing with the same sense of authority and access as Jim Henson: The Biography.” – The AV Club

“Jones’s biography brings to light a spirit of love, warmth, wit, and so much more.” – Library Journal

“An insightful look at the gentle artist.”– Parade

"I worked with Jim for over thirty years. He was one of my closest friends. And yet I found out things about him in Jim Henson that were new to me. Brian Jay Jones has captured the layers of Jim’s genius and humanity as well as the flaws that made Jim, like all of us, so delightfully imperfect. Jim needed this book to be written. I thank Brian for giving Jim life again. This book has captured the spirit of Jim Henson."—Frank Oz

“Masterful . . . In an era of pathography, this biography stands out as positive . . . Jones continually shows that Henson left the world a better place, which serves as the book’s theme. . . A solid biography that can be enjoyed by readers of more than one generation.” – Kirkus Reviews

“I’m a rabid Jim Henson fan—his brilliant ideas spawned shows that entertained and educated millions, myself included. Jim Henson vibrantly delves into the magnificent man and his Muppet methods. It’s an absolute must read!”—Neil Patrick Harris

“[Jones'] lucid style, wide-angle perspective, and deep immersion in Henson’s exuberantly innovative approach to puppets, television, and film make for a thoroughly compelling read . . . With verve and insight, Jones illuminates the full scope of Henson’s genius, phenomenal productivity, complex private life, zeal to do good, and astronomical influence.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Sure to be savored for its exhaustive look at the late Muppet-master.” – Variety

“ . . .a nuanced study of a preternaturally gifted, relentlessly driven artist . . . Jones does a superlative job organizing a massive amount of information, covering the assembly of Henson’s team . . . while highlighting Henson’s myriad technical achievements.” – LA Review of Books

“The author of a much-praised biography of Washington Irving, Jones is obviously fond of slightly off-center American geniuses. And he has a nerd’s love of minutiae that goes with his passion for oddity . . . [Jim Henson] is about the triumph of detail, the obsessive refining of an idea until it succeeds.“– The Washington Post

“If ever you had a single question about the felt magic Jim Henson managed to create, chances are Brian Jay Jones’ sweeping new biography of the puppeteer will answer it . . . it gives a glimpse of the silliness on Muppet sets, of Henson’s drive and his soft-spoken genius that in such a short life managed to create so much. It is a better world with the Muppets. And we are better off with this careful account of their master.”– Associated Press

” A heartwarming, endearing, and joyful study . . . [Jones] gives us a real Jim Henson, not a saint to be sure, but a man who devoted his creative genius to making the world a better place . . . In many places it seems that Henson is doing the talking right off the page. This book is fast-paced like his life, zany like his characters, full of fun and laughter . . . It is all here in this sweeping portrait that is a mix of humor, mirth and poignancy.” – Washington Independent Review of Books

“This is a biography that earns the label definitive.” — Dallas Morning News

“Every Muppet fan has wondered who was behind the wide-mouthed, bug-eyed, furry creatures. Before now all we had was a credit line: Jim Henson. Now, with Brian Jay Jones’s riveting Jim Henson, we have a nuanced portrait of the puppeteer—part genius inspired by his Mississippi Delta roots and his Christian Science faith, part flawed human with tastes too rich in everything from his art and cars to his women—that brings new understanding of and empathy for an icon of American popular culture.”—Larry Tye, author of Satchel and Superman

“One of ‘Ten Hot Fall Reads’ . . . The story of the innovative puppeteer’s life that Muppets completists have been waiting for . . . The section on Henson’s death and funeral is one of the best parts of the book — moving and elegiac. I dare you not to cry.” — The Hollywood Reporter

“There are so many enjoyable aspects to this book that it’s hard to know where to start . . . Jim Henson: The Biography is a fantastic story of a brilliant life cut short, but it can also be read as a blueprint for following your bliss.” — Book Page

UNBROKEN

By Laura Hillenbrand

ISBN: 9781400064168

Rating: 4.45 by 157696 users

Description

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.

The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.

Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.

In her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a man’s journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.

DAYS THAT I'LL REMEMBER

By Jonathan Cott

ISBN: 9780307951281

Rating: 3.60 by 0 users

Description

None

DEATH OF SANTINI, THE

By Pat Conroy

ISBN: 9780385530903

Rating: 4.08 by 156 users

Description

In this powerful and intimate memoir, the beloved bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and his father, the inspiration for The Great Santini, find some common ground at long last.

Pat Conroy's father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son's life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, "I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for 'hate.'" As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the toll his father's behavior took on his siblings, and especially on his mother, Peg. She was Pat's lifeline to a better world-that of books and culture. But eventually, despite repeated confrontations with his father, Pat managed to claw his way toward a life he could have only imagined as a child.

Pat's great success as a writer has always been intimately linked with the exploration of his family history. While the publication of The Great Santini brought Pat much acclaim, the rift it caused with his father brought even more attention. Their long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an already battered family. But as Pat tenderly chronicles here, even the oldest of wounds can heal. In the final years of Don Conroy's life, he and his son reached a rapprochement of sorts. Quite unexpectedly, the Santini who had freely doled out physical abuse to his wife and children refocused his ire on those who had turned on Pat over the years. He defended his son's honor.

The Death of Santini is at once a heart-wrenching account of personal and family struggle and a poignant lesson in how the ties of blood can both strangle and offer succor. It is an act of reckoning, an exorcism of demons, but one whose ultimate conclusion is that love can soften even the meanest of men, lending significance to one of the most-often quoted lines from Pat's bestselling novel The Prince of Tides: "In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness."

HEADS IN BEDS

By Jacob Tomsky

ISBN: 9780307948342

Rating: 3.52 by 28 users

Description

In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry.

Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know.
Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge.

Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.

MASTERING THE ART OF SOV

By Anya Von Bremzen

ISBN: 9780307886811

Rating: 4.04 by 149 users

Description

A celebrated food writer captures the flavors of the Soviet experience in a sweeping, tragicomic, multi-generational memoir that brilliantly illuminates the history and culture of a vanished empire.

Proust had his madeleine; Narnia's Edmund had his Turkish delight. Anya von Bremzen has vobla-rock-hard, salt-cured dried Caspian roach fish. Lovers of vobla risk breaking a tooth or puncturing a gum on the once-popular snack, but for Anya it's transporting. Like kotleti (Soviet burgers) or the festive Salat Olivier, it summons up the complex, bittersweet flavors of life in that vanished Atlantis called the USSR. There, born in 1963 in a Kafkaesque communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at her school, and, like most Soviet citizens, longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy-and, finally, intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother. When she was ten, the two of them fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.

These days Anya lives in two parallel food universes: one in which she writes about four-star restaurants, the other in which a simple banana-a once a year treat back in the USSR-still holds an almost talismanic sway over her psyche. To make sense of that past, she and her mother decided to eat and cook their way through seven decades of the Soviet experience. Through the meals she and her mother re-create, Anya tells the story of three generations-her grandparents', her mother's, and her own. Her family's stories are embedded in a larger historical epic: of Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II hunger and survival, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's anti-alcohol policies, and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of it is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia, and piercing observations.

This is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses.

MOM & ME & MOM (UAB)(CD)

By Maya Angelou

ISBN: 9780449808221

Rating: 3.95 by 29 users

Description

The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother.

For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,” revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them.

Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights.

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

By Piper Kerman

ISBN: 9780385523394

Rating: 3.67 by 373 users

Description

With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187–424—one of the millions of people who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman’s story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison—why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they’re there.

RIGHT PATH, THE (UAB)(CD)

By Joe Scarborough
George Newbern

ISBN: 9780804190312

Rating: 3.00 by 1 users

Description

Joe Scarborough—former Republican congressman and the always insightful host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe—takes a nuanced and surprising look at the unexpected rise and self-inflicted fall of the Republican Party. Dominant in national politics for forty years under the influence of the conservative but pragmatic leadership of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the GOP, Scarborough argues, is in a self-inflicted eclipse. The only way forward? Recover the principled realism of the giants who led the party to greatness.

In the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide, the Republican Party appeared to be on the verge of permanent irrelevance. LBJ’s Great Society was institutionalizing sweeping liberal reforms, and the United States had a thriving, prosperous economy. Yet in an instant everything changed, and the next four decades would witness an unprecedented era of Republican ascendancy. What happened?

In The Right Path, Joe Scarborough looks back in time to discern how Republicans once dominated American public life. From Eisenhower’s refusal to let “the perfect be the enemy of the good” to Reagan’s charismatic but resolutely practical genius, Scarborough shows how principled pragmatism, combined with a commitment to core conservative values, led to victory after victory.

Now, however, political incalcitrance is threatening to turn a once-mighty party into a permanent minority.

Opening with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965—the high-water moment for liberalism—and ending with the national disillusionment that set in after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, The Right Path effortlessly blends American political history with astute analysis and pithy, no-holds-barred commentary. Both a bracing call to arms and a commonsense history, The Right Path provides an illuminating look at conservatism and its discontents—and why the GOP must regain its former tone and tradition if it hopes to survive.

Advance praise for The Right Path

“The Right Path is the right book at the right time to spark a much-needed conversation about the future of the Republican Party.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin

“If you’re interested in the Republican future, you need to read The Right Path. I don’t agree with all of it, but Joe Scarborough has written a book that’s both thought-provoking and fun.”—William Kristol

“Joe Scarborough’s lively, provocative, and instructive history of the modern Republican Party will stir up the GOP—which is exactly what he has in mind. As the Grand Old Party searches for a path to victory, Joe offers some important lessons to be learned.”—Tom Brokaw

“Joe Scarborough’s incisive, original, provocative, and well-argued book, deploying American political history both distant and recent, deserves to be widely read, carefully considered, and energetically debated.”—Michael Beschloss

“Blending political and cultural history with sharp analysis, Joe Scarborough’s The Right Path is highly readable, timely, and, most important, provocative. This book comes at a crucial time for the Republican Party.”—Craig Shirley

“Joe Scarborough, a good Republican, wants to save the Republicans from themselves. In this provocative, lively, and wise book, he shows the way.”—Evan Thomas

From the Hardcover edition.

BECOMING MR. OCTOBER

By Reggie Jackson
Kevin Baker

ISBN: 9780385533119

Rating: 3.11 by 18 users

Description

A soul-baring, brutally candid, and richly eventful memoir of the two years—1977 and 1978—when Reggie Jackson went from outcast to Yankee legend

In the spring of 1977 Reggie Jackson should have been on top of the world. The best player of the Oakland A’s dynasty, which won three straight World Series, he was the first big-money free agent, wooed and flattered by George Steinbrenner into coming to the New York Yankees, which hadn’t won a World Series since 1962. But Reggie was about to learn, as he writes in this vivid and surprising memoir, that until his initial experience on the Yankees “I didn’t know what alone meant.”
     His manager, the mercurial, alcoholic, and pugilistic Billy Martin, never wanted him on the team and let Reggie—and the rest of the team—know it. Most of his new teammates, resentful of his contract, were aloof at best and hostile at worst. Brash and outspoken, but unused to the ferocity of New York’s tabloid culture, Reggie hadn’t realized how rumor and offhand remarks can turn into screaming negative headlines—especially for a black athlete with a multimillion-dollar contract. Sickened by Martin’s anti-Semitism, his rages, and his quite public disparagement of his new star, ostracized by his teammates, and despairing of how he was stereotyped in the press, Reggie had long talks with his father about quitting. Things hit bottom when Martin plotted to humiliate him during a nationally televised game against the Red Sox. It seemed as if a glorious career had been derailed.
     But then: Reggie vowed to persevere; his pride, work ethic, and talent would overcome Martin’s nearly sociopathic hatred. Gradually, he would win over the fans, then his teammates, as the Yankees surged to the pennant. And one magical autumn evening, he became “Mr. October” in a World Series performance for the ages. He thought his travails were over—until the next season when the insanity began again.
     Becoming Mr. October is a revelatory self-portrait of a baseball icon at the height of his public fame and private anguish. Filled with revealing anecdotes about the notorious “Bronx Zoo” Yankees of the late 1970s and bluntly honest portrayals of his teammates and competitors, this is eye-opening baseball history as can be told only by the man who lived it.

REMOTE

By David Heinemeier Hansson
Jason Fried

ISBN: 9780804137508

Rating: 3.62 by 9 users

Description

The “work from home” phenomenon is thoroughly explored in this illuminating new book from bestselling 37signals founders Fried and Hansson, who point to the surging trend of employees working from home (and anywhere else) and explain the challenges and unexpected benefits. Most important, they show why – with a few controversial exceptions such as Yahoo -- more businesses will want to promote this new model of getting things done.

The Industrial Revolution's "under one roof" model of conducting work is steadily declining owing to technology that is rapidly creating virtual workspaces and allowing workers to provide their vital contribution without physically clustering together. Today, the new paradigm is "move work to the workers, rather than workers to the workplace." According to Reuters, one in five global workers telecommutes frequently and nearly ten percent work from home every day. Moms in particular will welcome this trend. A full 60% wish they had a flexible work option. But companies see advantages too in the way remote work increases their talent pool, reduces turnover, lessens their real estate footprint, and improves the ability to conduct business across multiple time zones, to name just a few advantages. In Remote, inconoclastic authors Fried and Hansson will convince readers that letting all or part of work teams function remotely is a great idea--and they're going to show precisely how a remote work setup can be accomplished.

OWN YOUR KITCHEN

By Anne Burrell
Suzanne Lenzer

ISBN: 9780307886767

Rating: 4.08 by 13 users

Description

None

AMUSE-BOUCHE

By Rick Tramonto
Mary Goodbody
Tim Turner

ISBN: 9780375507601

Rating: 4.17 by 35 users

Description

Amuse-bouche (pronounced ah-myuz boosh) are today what hors d'oeuvres were to America in the 1950s: a relatively unknown feature of French culinary tradition that, once introduced, immediately became standard fare. Chefs at many fine restaurants offer guests an amuse-bouche, a bite-sized treat that excites the tongue and delights the eye, before the meal is served. Nobody does it better than the celebrated executive chef/partner of Chicago’s Tru, Rick Tramonto. Amuse-bouche are a fa-vorite of diners at Tru, many of whom come expressly to enjoy the “grand amuse"--an assortment of four different taste sensations.

Amuse-Bouche offers an array of recipes, from elegant and sophisticated to casual and surprising—but always exquisite—that will inspire home cooks to share these culinary jewels with their guests. From Black Mission Figs with Mascarpone Foam and Prosciutto di Parma to Curried Three-Bean Salad, from Soft Polenta with Forest Mushrooms to Blue Cheese Foam with Port Wine Reduction, Tramonto’s creations will embolden the novice and the experienced cook alike to experiment with unfamiliar ingredients and techniques.

Organized by type of amuse and season of the year, the book also includes a directory of sources for specialty products. With more than a hundred recipes and with fifty-two full-page color photographs by James Beard Award--winning photographer Tim Turner, Amuse-Bouche enchants the eyes as much as an amuse pleases the palate.

GLAZED, FILLED, SUGARED & DIPP

By Stephen Collucci
Liz Gunnison

ISBN: 9780770433574

Rating: 2.75 by 4 users

Description

Whether you think of them as “doughnuts” or “donuts,” you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to make these sweet treats at home.

Dripping with chocolate glaze, bursting with sweet vanilla cream or blackberry jam filling, or simply rolled in cinnamon sugar—doughnuts, however you like them, can’t be beat when freshly made. And they’re surprisingly easy to fry—or bake—from scratch.
Glazed, Filled, Sugared & Dipped includes recipes for classic cake and yeast-raised doughnuts as well as for zeppole, beignets, churros, bomboloni, and doughnut holes—plus glazes, fillings, and sauces to mix and match. With more than 50 recipes and 50 full-color photographs, this cookbook will open up the wonderful world of homemade doughnuts to any home baker.

EXTREME CAKEOVERS

By Rick Reichart

ISBN: 9780307985200

Rating: 4.11 by 8 users

Description

None

VINTAGE CAKES

By Julie Richardson

ISBN: 9781607741022

Rating: 3.88 by 134 users

Description

A charming collection of updated recipes for both classic and forgotten cakes, from a timeless yellow birthday cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, to the Christmas standard, Bûche de Noël, written by a master baker and coauthor of Rustic Fruit Desserts.

Cakes are central to the way we celebrate, whether that celebration is a birthday, a wedding, or just a warm summer evening. With recipes for no-bake, roll, layer, and upside-down cakes from both the recent and more distant past, Vintage Cakes is a confectionary stroll down memory lane. Some of the delicious favorites to be rediscovered include: a frosted fairy cake (a hit at children’s birthday parties), the picnic-ready lemon icebox cake with white chocolate cream, and a boozy eggnog bundt cake with brandy butter glaze. With Richardson’s modern look at beloved baked goods, these 65 nostalgic and fool-proof recipes rekindle our love affair with cakes.

CASSEROLE QUEENS MAKE-A-MEAL C

By Crystal Cook
Sandy Pollock

ISBN: 9780770436803

Rating: 3.58 by 12 users

Description

Casseroles, meet your match!

Crystal Cook and Sandy Pollock are shaking things up. The sassy duo—also known as the Casserole Queens—creates one-dish wonders that solve dinnertime conundrums everywhere. Now these ladies are breaking out of the 9 x 13-inch mold with fresh sides and salads that will round out weeknight meals. In The Casserole Queens Make-a-Meal Cookbook, you will find 100 recipes that you can mix and match as you please, with plenty of make-ahead tips so that you can always be prepared.
Need to pull together dinner in a flash? Check! Need to plan an elegant meal for the in-laws? Check! Need to cook and successfully transport a dish to a party? Check! In this book, you’ll find:

   • 46 make-from-scratch casseroles, 37 salads and sides, 13 quick-fix desserts, and more
   • Gluten-free and diabetic-friendly recipes (you’d never know it!)
   • Plenty of satisfying vegetarian main dishes
   • A chapter of recipes using seven ingredients or fewer—most of which are likely already in your pantry
   • Variations, freezing tips, and serving ideas galore
Whether you are looking to make dinner tonight, a potluck crowd-pleaser, or a fix-and-freeze dish to save for later, The Casserole Queens Make-a-Meal Cookbook has everything you need to prepare a delicious homemade meal.

LOST RECIPES

By Marion Cunningham
Carol Devine Carson

ISBN: 9780375411984

Rating: 4.00 by 55 users

Description

From:Marion Cunningham
To:The American home cook
Subject (URGENT):The family table

We need to lure our families, friends, and neighbors back to the table, to sit down and eat together. It is important that we be in charge again of our cooking, working with fresh, unadulterated ingredients. Enclosed you will find many simple-to-make, good-tasting, inexpensive dishes from the past that taste better than ever today. I urge you to try them.

· Good soups—satisfying one-dish meals that can be made ahead
· Dishes that can be made with what’s on hand—First-Prize Onion Casserole, Shepherd’s Pie, Salmon or Tuna Loaf
· Vegetables baked and ready for the table
· Real salads, substantial enough for lunch or supper, with snappy dressings
· Breads and cookies, puddings and cakes that you loved as a child

PS: There is nothing like the satisfaction of sharing with others something you have cooked yourself

PUDDIN'

By Clio Goodman

ISBN: 9780812994193

Rating: 4.10 by 10 users

Description

The classic American treat finally gets its due: foolproof pudding recipes, from irresistible standards to inventive modern twists, by the chef and owner of New York City’s popular pudding destination.

Puddin’ shares Clio Goodman’s secrets for re-creating—and improving on—your sweetest childhood memories. From grown-up renditions of snack-time favorites like Butterscotch Pudding (spiked with whiskey) to party-ready showstoppers like Banana Upside-Down Cake with Malted Pudding and summertime crowd-pleasers like Peanut Butter Fudge Pops and Peach Melba Parfaits, Puddin’ serves up luscious and decadent recipes for your every dessert whim. Along the way, Clio offers suggestions for adapting her pudding recipes—all of which are naturally gluten-free—for vegan and low-fat variations. And because creamy pudding just begs for a companion, Puddin’ also includes recipes for homemade toppings, such as Salted Caramel Sauce, Marshmallow Crème, and Brownie Crumbs, that can be mixed and matched with the puddings of your choice or incorporated into one of Clio’s signature parfaits.

These surprisingly easy-to-execute pudding creations are destined to become staples of your dessert repertoire. Puddin’ is a celebration of an American classic.

Praise for Puddin’

“Clio Goodman has a talent for transforming simple, elemental ingredients into amazing desserts. Puddin’ brings back memories of simpler times, and coming back to pudding is a return to an elemental form of inspiration. These sweet treats are the ultimate in comforting indulgence.”—Ron Ben-Israel, host of Sweet Genius

BAREFOOT CONTESSA COOKBOOK COL

By Ina Garten

ISBN: 9780307720016

Rating: 4.45 by 31 users

Description

In her first ever boxed set, bestselling cookbook author and Food Network star Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, unites her initial three titles in one beautiful package.

Here are the books that started it all for Ina Garten, who turned a passion for food into a successful specialty food store in the Hamptons and is now beloved by millions for her Barefoot Contessa television show and cookbooks. The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, Ina's first book, has all of the fabulous, easy recipes that won Ina a loyal following at her retail shop, including Perfect Roast Chicken, French Potato Salad, and those irresistible Coconut Cupcakes. In Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ina shares her very best menus, divided by season, for fuss-free yet gorgeous entertaining, from a summer garden lunch for eight to an intimate fireside dinner for two. Barefoot Contessa Family Style is full of crowd-pleasers you'll make again and again, like roasted asparagus showered with freshly grated Parmesan and a French toast made with challah and just the right amount of grated orange zest and pure vanilla extract to make it sing.

Together, these three titles form a timeless collection perfect for every home cook, whether accomplished or amateur, and for every occasion, whether a weeknight dinner with family or a larger, more festive gathering. With stunning photography and Ina's helpful tips, this boxed set makes the perfect gift for those who love to cook.

JULIA & JACQUES COOKING AT HOM

By Julia Child
Jacques Pépin

ISBN: 9780375404313

Rating: 4.20 by 1344 users

Description

The companion volume to the public television series Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home

Two legendary cooks, Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, invite us into their kitchen and show us the basics of good home cooking.
        What makes this book unique is the richness of information they offer on every page, as they demonstrate techniques (on which they don't always agree), discuss ingredients, improvise, balance flavors to round out a meal, and conjure up new dishes from leftovers. Center stage in these pages are carefully spelled-out recipes flanked by Julia's comments and Jacques's comments--the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime of honing their cooking skills. Nothing is written in stone, they imply. And that is one of the most important lessons for every good cook.
        So sharpen your knives and join in the fun as you learn to make . . .

        *--Appetizers--from traditional and instant grav-lax to your own sausage in brioche and a country pâté
        *--Soups--from New England chicken chowder and onion soup gratinée to Mediterranean seafood stew and that creamy essence of mussels, billi-bi
        *--Eggs--omelets and "tortillas"; scrambled, poached, and coddled eggs; eggs as a liaison for sauces and as the puffing power for soufflés
        *--Salads and Sandwiches--basic green and near-Niçoise salads; a crusty round seafood-stuffed bread, a lobster roll, and a pan bagnat
        *--Potatoes--baked, mashed, hash-browned, scalloped, souffléd, and French-fried
        *--Vegetables--the favorites from artichokes to tomatoes, blanched, steamed, sautéed, braised, glazed, and gratinéed
        *--Fish--familiar varieties whole and filleted (with step-by-step instructions for preparing your own), steamed en papillote, grilled, seared, roasted, and poached, plus a classic sole meunière and the essentials of lobster cookery
        *--Poultry--the perfect roast chicken (Julia's way and Jacques's way); holiday turkey, Julia's deconstructed and Jacques's galantine; their two novel approaches to duck
        *--Meat--the right technique for each cut of meat (along with lessons in cutting up), from steaks and hamburger to boeuf bourguignon and roast leg of lamb
        *--Desserts--crème caramel, profiteroles, chocolate roulade, free-form apple tart--as you make them you'll learn all the important building blocks for handling dough, cooking custards, preparing fillings and frostings
        And much, much more . . .

        Throughout this richly illustrated book you'll see Julia's and Jacques's hands at work, and you'll sense the pleasure the two are having cooking together, tasting, exchanging ideas, joshing with each other, and raising a glass to savor the fruits of their labor. Again and again they demonstrate that cooking is endlessly fascinating and challenging and, while ultimately personal, it is a joy to be shared.

MASTERING ART/FR CKG V1

By Julia Child
Simone Beck
Louisette Bertholle

ISBN: 9780375413407

Rating: 4.35 by 18112 users

Description

This is the classic cookbook, in its entirety—all 524 recipes.

“Anyone can cook in the French manner anywhere,” wrote Mesdames Beck, Bertholle, and Child, “with the right instruction.” And here is the book that, for more than forty years, has been teaching Americans how.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking is for both seasoned cooks and beginners who love good food and long to reproduce at home the savory delights of the classic cuisine, from the historic Gallic masterpieces to the seemingly artless perfection of a dish of spring-green peas. This beautiful book, with more than 100 instructive illustrations, is revolutionary in its approach because:

• it leads the cook infallibly from the buying and handling of raw ingredients, through each essential step of a recipe, to the final creation of a delicate confection;

• it breaks down the classic cuisine into a logical sequence of themes and variations rather than presenting an endless and diffuse catalogue of recipes; the focus is on key recipes that form the backbone of French cookery and lend themselves to an infinite number of elaborations—bound to increase anyone’s culinary repertoire;

• it adapts classical techniques, wherever possible, to modern American conveniences;

• it shows Americans how to buy products, from any supermarket in the United States, that reproduce the exact taste and texture of the French ingredients, for example, equivalent meat cuts, the right beans for a cassoulet, or the appropriate fish and seafood for a bouillabaisse;

• it offers suggestions for just the right accompaniment to each dish, including proper wines.

Since there has never been a book as instructive and as workable as Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the techniques learned here can be applied to recipes in all other French cookbooks, making them infinitely more usable. In compiling the secrets of famous cordons bleus, the authors have produced a magnificent volume that is sure to find the place of honor in every kitchen in America.

Bon appétit!

GIADA'S FEEL GOOD FOOD

By Giada De Laurentiis

ISBN: 9780307987204

Rating: 4.33 by 22 users

Description

Food Network’s most beautiful star reveals her secrets for staying fit and feeling great in this gorgeous, practical book with healthy recipes including nutritional information, and personal lifestyle and beauty tips.

Finally answering the question her fans ask most often, “How do you stay so trim?,” Giada De Laurentiis shares the delicious easy recipes and tips she uses to maximize energy and remain fit. Here are 120 recipes for breakfasts, juices, lunches, snacks, dinners, and desserts that can be combined into 30 days of delicious feel-good meals. So that everyone can enjoy these dishes, many are gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, and/or vegan, with helpful icons to call them out—and, for the very first time, each recipe includes a calorie count and nutritional analysis. Special sections delve into Giada's everyday life, including her beauty and exercise routines, how she satisfies sugar fixes, what’s always in her bag, and her ordering tips for eating in restaurants. With 100 color photographs, Giada’s Feel Good Food is a beautiful guide to staying on track while still eating everything and enjoying life to its fullest.

PALEO CKG FROM ELANA'S PANTRY

By Elana Amsterdam

ISBN: 9781607745518

Rating: 3.65 by 53 users

Description

A family-friendly collection of simple paleo recipes that emphasize protein and produce, from breakfasts to entrees to treats, from the popular gluten-free blogger of Elana's Pantry.

Whether you are looking to eliminate gluten, dairy, grains, or processed foods from your diet, Paleo cooking is the perfect solution for food allergy relief and better all-around health. Naturally based on the foods our Paleolithic ancestors ate for generations, the Paleo diet emphasizes meat and seafood, vegetables, fruit, and nuts.

Author and beloved food blogger Elana Amsterdam has been living grain free for over ten years; in Paleo Cooking from Elana’s Pantry, Amsterdam offers up her streamlined techniques and recipes with minimal ingredients for busy cooks on the run. She transforms simple, classic family favorites such as pancakes and ice cream with Paleo-friendly ingredients like almond flour and coconut milk. Paleo Cooking from Elana’s Pantry includes nearly 100 recipes featuring the Paleo mainstays of lean proteins and simple vegetable dishes, plus wholesome sweet treats—all free from grains, gluten, and dairy, and made with natural sweeteners.

ESSENTIALS OF CLASSIC ITALIAN

By Marcella Hazan
Karin Kretschmann

ISBN: 9780394584041

Rating: 4.29 by 4391 users

Description

Almost twenty years ago, with the publication of The Classic Italian Cook Book, followed by More Classic Italian Cooking, Marcella Hazan introduced Americans to a whole new world of Italian food. As Roy Andries de Groot wrote, “Marcella’s book is the most authentic guide to Italian food ever written in the U.S. Where other authors failed, Marcella has brilliantly succeeded in capturing (and conveying to the reader on every page) the feel, the aromatic scent, the subtle nuances of fresh country flavors and, above all, the easy uncomplication of Italian food prepared in the Italian style.”

Now a new generation is ready to master the art of Italian cooking, and their bible will be Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking—this new volume that combines the two books, updates and expanded throughout. Designed as a basic manual for cooks on every level—from beginners to accomplished professionals—it offers both an accessible and comprehensive guide to techniques and ingredients and a collection of the most delicious recipes from the Italian repertoire.

LIDIA COOKS FROM THE HEART OF

By Lidia Matticchio Bastianich
Tanya Bastianich Manuali

ISBN: 9780307267511

Rating: 4.12 by 50 users

Description

In this inspiring new book, Lidia Bastianich awakens in us a new respect for food and for the people who produce it in the little-known parts of Italy that she explores. All of the recipes reflect the regions from which they spring, and in translating them to our home kitchens, Lidia passes on time-honored techniques and wonderful, uncomplicated recipes for dishes bursting with different regional flavors—the kind of elemental, good family cooking that is particularly appreciated today.

Penetrating the heart of Italy—starting at the north, working down to the tip, and ending in Sardinia—Lidia unearths a wealth of recipes:

From Trentino–Alto Adige: Delicious Dumplings with Speck (cured pork); apples accenting soup, pasta, salsa, and salad; local beer used to roast a chicken and to braise beef
From Lombardy: A world of rice—baked in a frittata, with lentils, with butternut squash, with gorgonzola, and the special treat of Risotto Milan-Style with Marrow and Saffron
From Valle d’Aosta: Polenta with Black Beans and Kale, and local fontina featured in fondue, in a roasted pepper salad, and embedded in veal chops
From Liguria: An array of Stuffed Vegetables, a bread salad, and elegant Veal Stuffed with a Mosaic of Vegetables
From Emilia-Romagna: An olive oil dough for making the traditional, versatile vegetable tart erbazzone, as well as the secrets of making tagliatelle and other pasta doughs, and an irresistible Veal Scaloppine Bolognese
From Le Marche: Farro with Roasted Pepper Sauce, Lamb Chunks with Olives, and Stuffed Quail in Parchment
From Umbria: A taste of the sweet Norcino black truffle, and seductive dishes such as Potato-Mushroom Cake with Braised Lentils, Sausages in the Skillet with Grapes, and Chocolate Bread Parfait
From Abruzzo: Fresh scrippelle (crêpe) ribbons baked with spinach or garnishing a soup, fresh pasta made with a “guitar,” Rabbit with Onions, and Lamb Chops with Olives
From Molise: Fried Ricotta; homemade cavatelli pasta in a variety of ways; Spaghetti with Calamari, Shrimp, and Scallops; and Braised Octopus
From Basilicata: Wedding Soup, Fiery Maccheroni, and Farro with Pork Ragù
From Calabria: Shepherd’s Rigatoni, steamed swordfish, and Almond Biscottini
From Sardinia: Flatbread Lasagna, two lovely eggplant dishes, and Roast Lobster with Bread Crumb Topping

This is just a sampling of the many delights Lidia has uncovered. All the recipes she shares with us in this rich feast of a book represent the work of the local people and friends with whom she made intimate contact—the farmers, shepherds, foragers, and artisans who produce local cheeses, meats, olive oils, and wines. And in addition, her daughter, Tanya, takes us on side trips in each of the twelve regions to share her love of the country and its art.

KOSHER NATION

By Sue Fishkoff

ISBN: 9780805242652

Rating: 3.85 by 93 users

Description

Kosher? That means the rabbi blessed it, right? Not exactly. In this captivating account of a Bible-based practice that has grown into a multibillions-dollar industry, journalist Sue Fishkoff travels throughout America and to Shanghai, China, to find out who eats kosher food, who produces it, who is responsible for its certification, and how this fascinating world continues to evolve. She explains why 86 percent of the 11.2 million Americans who regularly buy kosher food are not observant Jews—they are Muslims, Seventh-day Adventists, vegetarians, people with food allergies, and consumers who pay top dollar for food they believe “answers to a higher authority.”

Fishkoff interviews food manufacturers, rabbinic supervisors, and ritual slaughterers; meets with eco-kosher adherents who go beyond traditional requirements to produce organic chicken and pasture-raised beef; sips boutique kosher wine in Napa Valley; talks to shoppers at an upscale kosher supermarket in Brooklyn; and marches with unemployed workers at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant. She talks to Reform Jews who are rediscovering the spiritual benefits of kashrut, and to Conservative and Orthodox Jews who are demanding that kosher food production adhere to ethical and environmental values. And she chronicles the corruption, price-fixing, and strong arm tactics of early-twentieth-century kosher meat production, against which contemporary kashrut standards pale by comparison.

A revelatory look at the current state of kosher in America, this book will appeal to anyone interested in food, religion, Jewish identity, or big business.

PERFECT PIES & MORE

By Michele Stuart

ISBN: 9780345544193

Rating: 4.00 by 0 users

Description

After the success of Perfect Pies, National Pie Baking Champion (27 times!) Michele Stuart went back into the kitchen—the same kitchen in Vermont where she first dreamed up the award-winning creations that inspired her to open the popular Michele’s Pies shops. Returning there also meant returning to the cherished pies she learned to bake under her grandmother’s and mother’s watchful eyes, as well as the wonderful cakes, cookies, and other sweet treats that became their family tradition.

In her newest cookbook, Perfect Pies & More, Stuart delves deeper into her roots while creating delicious new memories made with love and care. Inside, you’ll find tantalizing recipes—some easy-to-bake, some requiring a bit more finesse—for dozens of her favorite fruit, nut, and cream pies, and so much more.

• NEW TWISTS ON OLD FAVORITES: Pineapple-Pomegranate Pie with Coconut Crumb, Orange Creamsicle Pie, Almond Joy Pie
• WHIMSICAL PIES: Thin Mint Chocolate Cookie Pie, Key Lime-Blackberry Chiffon Pie, Cannoli Party Dip Pie
• CRUSTS & TOPPINGS: Pretzel Crust, Oreo Cookie Crust, Walnut Crumb Topping
• COOKIES & BARS: Blondies, Double Chocolate Walnut Cookies, Lemon Crunch Bars
• PERFECT FOR A CUP OF TEA: Applesauce Cake, Double Chocolate Bundt Cake, Cranberry-Orange Walnut Bread
• LOVIN’ SPOONFUL: Apple Crisp, Blueberry-Blackberry Turnovers, Bread Pudding
• TOP THIS: Caramel Sauce, Raspberry Glacé, Classic Meringue, Maple Whipped Cream, Chocolate Whipped Cream, Buttercream

Sprinkled throughout with mouthwatering photos, Perfect Pies & More also serves up tips, techniques, and the secrets behind several of Michele Stuart’s National Pie Championship winners—including Banana Coconut Pecan Delight. Now a perfect blue-ribbon pie and other scrumptious delicacies are as close as your own kitchen!

Rave reviews for Michele’s Pies

“You owe yourself a visit to Michele’s Pies, where pie fillings range from fruits and nuts to butterscotch to just about everything in between.”—The New York Times

“Michele is the undisputed champion of pies, and now she’s sharing even more sweet treats from the oven! Her home-cook–friendly recipes are creative, easy, and delicious. I’m a better baker because of this wonderful book. Happy Dance!”—David Venable, QVC host and author of In the Kitchen with David

A.O.C. COOKBOOK, THE

By Suzanne Goin

ISBN: 9780307958235

Rating: 4.67 by 3 users

Description

Since her James Beard Award-winning first book, Sunday Suppers at Lucques, Suzanne Goin and her Los Angeles empire of restaurants have blossomed and she has been lauded as one of the best chefs in the country. Now, she is bringing us the recipes from her sophomore restaurant, A.O.C., turning the small-plate, shared-style dishes that she made so famous into main courses for the home chef. Among her many recipes, you can expect her addictive Bacon-Wrapped Dates with Parmesan; Duck Sausage with Candied Kumquats; Dandelion and Roasted Carrot Salad with Black Olives and Ricotta Salata; California Sea Bass with Tomato Rice, Fried Egg, and Sopressata; Lamb Meatballs with Spiced Tomato Sauce, Mint, and Feta; Crème Fraîche Cake with Santa Rosa Plums and Pistachios in Olive Oil; and S’Mores with Caramel Popcorn and Chocolate Sorbet.

But The A.O.C. Cookbook is much more than just a collection of recipes. Because Goin is a born teacher with a gift for pairing seasonal flavors, this book is full of wonderful, eye-opening information about the ingredients that she holds dear. She takes the time to talk you through each one of her culinary decisions, explaining her palate and how she gets the deeply developed flavor profiles, which make even the simplest dishes sing. More than anything, Goin wants you to understand her techniques so you enjoy yourself in the kitchen and have no problem achieving restaurant-quality results right at home.

And because wine and cheese are at the heart of A.O.C., there are two exciting additions. Caroline Styne, Goin’s business partner and the wine director for her restaurants, presents a specific wine pairing for each dish. Styne explains why each varietal works well with the ingredients and which flavors she’s trying to highlight, and she gives you room to experiment as well—showing how to shape the wine to your own palate. Whether you’re just grabbing a glass to go with dinner or planning an entire menu, her expert notes are a real education in wine. At the back of the book, you’ll find Goin’s amazing glossary of cheeses—all featured at A.O.C.—along with the notes that are given to the waitstaff, explaining the sources, flavor profiles, and pairings.

With more than 125 full-color photographs, The A.O.C. Cookbook brings Suzanne Goin’s dishes to life as she continues to invite us into her kitchen and divulge the secrets about what makes her food so irresistibly delicious.

VEGETABLE LITERACY

By Deborah Madison

ISBN: 9781607741916

Rating: 4.29 by 163 users

Description

In her latest cookbook, Deborah Madison, America's leading authority on vegetarian cooking and author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, reveals the surprising relationships between vegetables, edible flowers, and herbs within the same botanical families, and how understanding these connections can help home cooks see everyday vegetables in new light.

For over three decades, Deborah Madison has been at the vanguard of the vegetarian cooking movement, authoring classic books on the subject and emboldening millions of readers to cook simple, elegant, plant-based food.

This groundbreaking new cookbook is Madison’s crowning achievement: a celebration of the diversity of the plant kingdom, and an exploration of the fascinating relationships between vegetables, edible flowers, herbs, and familiar wild plants within the same botanical families.

Destined to become the new standard reference for cooking vegetables, Vegetable Literacy shows cooks that, because of their shared characteristics, vegetables within the same family can be used interchangeably in cooking. It presents an entirely new way of looking at vegetables, drawing on Madison’s deep knowledge of cooking, gardening, and botany. For example, knowing that dill, chervil, cumin, parsley, coriander, anise, lovage, and caraway come from the umbellifer family makes it clear why they’re such good matches for carrots, also a member of that family. With more than 300 classic and exquisitely simple recipes, Madison brings this wealth of information together in dishes that highlight a world of complementary flavors. Griddled Artichokes with Tarragon Mayonnaise, Tomato Soup and Cilantro with Black Quinoa, Tuscan Kale Salad with Slivered Brussels Sprouts and Sesame Dressing, Kohlrabi Slaw with Frizzy Mustard Greens, and Fresh Peas with Sage on Baked Ricotta showcase combinations that are simultaneously familiar and revelatory.

Inspiring improvisation in the kitchen and curiosity in the garden, Vegetable Literacy—an unparalleled look at culinary vegetables and plants—will forever change the way we eat and cook.

FIELDS OF GREENS

By Anne Somerville

ISBN: 9780553091397

Rating: 4.11 by 46 users

Description

The opening of Greens Restaurant on San Francisco Bay in 1979 changed forever the image of vegetarian cooking in America.  From the restaurant's imaginative mix of casual elegance, exciting tastes, and a subtle message of health and harmony, a distinctive cuisine was born that has continued to bring joy to many thousands of diners every year as well as to the hundreds of thousands of readers who delight in The Greens Cookbook. In its latest incarnation, the restaurant has evolved toward a lighter, leaner, simpler cuisine, one that keeps all the spirit and refinement of the original menu but depends more on the excitement of sparkling fresh produce and its integral relationship to the dishes it inspires.

In close to 300 original recipes, the new Greens style includes exuberant salads, soups, the legendary crusty Greens pizzas, curries and hearty stews, grilled vegetables, and intriguing turnovers made with filo pastry, tortillas, and savory doughs.  And of course there are heavenly breads and the famous desserts, like ginger pound cake with poached apricots and cherries.  This cornucopia of brilliant dishes focuses on tantalizing tastes, with a new simplicity, clarity, and liveliness as its hallmark.

Annie Somerville, the executive chef at Greens, goes right to the heart of the matter: extraordinary produce that's bursting with flavor, color, and texture.  Some of her favorites--like crinkly Bloomsdale spinach, candy-striped Chioggia beets, succulent Rosefir potatoes--are highlighted in the text for gardeners and farmers' market aficionados.  But the Greens style is above all accessible; ordinary red beets will be just fine if more exotic varieties are unavailable.  To help with availability, there's information on locating farmers' markets throughout the country as well as sources for plants, seeds, and local resources.

Because the garden is at the center of this book, readers are encouraged to try their hand, in tiny backyards and windowsill boxes if necessary.  Invaluable growing tips are offered from Green Gulch Farm, the source of much of the stunning produce served at the restaurant.  Other special features include a section on low-fat cooking and another on pairing wine with vegetarian food.

All of the abundance and exuberance that the title Fields of Greens implies is here, for the novice as well as the expert, for simple last-minute meals as well as extravagant occasions.  For truly inspired contemporary vegetarian cooking, Fields of Greens is the essential sourcebook.

Annie Somerville trained under Deborah Madison, the founding chef at Greens Restaurant.  Under Somerville's guidance as executive chef, Greens has become a culinary landmark.  Her work has been featured in Gourmet, Food & Wine, Ladies' Home Journal, SF, and California magazine.  She also contributed to The Open Hand Cookbook and Women Chefs cookbook.

SOUTHERN SLOW COOKER, THE

By Kendra Bailey Morris

ISBN: 9781607745129

Rating: 3.33 by 9 users

Description

A collection of 60 soulful, comforting, and wonderfully convenient recipes for Southern favorites--from Black Eyed Peas with Stewed Tomatoes to Country-Style Pork Ribs to Molasses Gingerbread.

Cooking delicious, soul-warming Southern food that the whole family will love has never been easier!

Whether it’s a big pot of black-eyed peas, fall-apart tender pulled pork, or creamy apple butter, the greatest Southern dishes have one thing in common: they taste best when they’re cooked low and slow.

With more than sixty recipes for down-home favorites, ranging from Chicken and Cornmeal Dumplings to Buffalo Stout Beer Chili to Brown Beans and Fatback, The Southern Slow Cooker is packed with real Southern flavor. Author Kendra Bailey Morris presents regional classics from all over the South: church potlucks, Cajun and Creole traditions in the bayou, even her West Virginia granny’s old recipe book. Morris carefully tested and adapted each recipe for the home kitchen, and the result is a treasure for busy home cooks everywhere. With hardly any active cooking time and featuring affordable ingredients, every dish is simple, convenient, and downright delicious.

Start the slow cooker before work and come home to the mouthwatering aroma of Country-Style Pork Ribs. Or, prep the cooker on Sunday morning and have Breakfast Apples or a Sausage and Tater Tot Casserole ready by brunchtime. Since no Southern meal is complete without a sweet treat at the end, there are even slow cooker desserts, like Molasses Gingerbread, Lemon Blueberry Buckle, and Chocolate and Caramel Black Walnut Candies.

All of these satisfying, flavor-packed, and wonderfully simple recipes allow you to make the food you love in the time you have available—and will have you and your family begging for seconds.

M STEWART'S HOLIDAY CRAFTS

By Martha Stewart
Martha Stewart

ISBN: 9780307586902

Rating: 3.82 by 185 users

Description

Join Martha Stewart for a celebration of handcrafted holidays all year-round!

New Year’s – Valentine’s Day – Easter – Mother’s Day – Father’s Day – Fourth of July – Halloween – Thanksgiving – Hanukkah – Christmas

Let Martha inspire your creativity with the most beautiful crafts. The 225 handmade projects include cards and greetings, decorations, gifts and gift wrapping, tabletop accents, party favors, and kids’ crafts, as well as more holiday-specific activities, such as egg-dyeing, pumpkin carving, and tree trimming. Each idea is sure to make the holidays more festive—and memorable.

SUPER-SCARY MOCHIMOCHI

By Anna Kathleen Hrachovec

ISBN: 9780307965769

Rating: 3.81 by 16 users

Description

Toys to Scare You Silly!
What creatures lurk in the darkest shadows of Mochimochi Land? Only the most adorable assortment of knitted monsters, such as tiny vampire brats, a teenage werewolf, and a miniature gang of killer bees. They may be more cute than scary, but try not to bruise their egos. These toys think they’re terrifying!
You’ll find 20 patterns for big beasties, tiny critters, and even goblins that will gobble up your iPad, all rendered in Anna Hrachovec’s quirky signature style. Or create your own mix ʼn’ match monster with more than 20 customizable body parts and features that you can assemble any way you want. After all, nothing is scarier than a clever knitter armed with yarn, needles, and a wild imagination.
Whether you’re already a devoted fan of mochimochi, love scary stuff, or just need a good laugh, Super-Scary Mochimochi offers everything you need to knit your own world of creatures that will go bump in the night in the cutest way possible.

FRENCH ACCENTS

By Erin Swift

ISBN: 9780307985309

Rating: 3.50 by 4 users

Description

This lavishly illustrated volume shows you how to choose fabulous French decorating details to create interiors with an unforgettable sense of sophistication and charm. French details are the key to achieving the effortless chic of the French home.

The first step is to understand how the French see—blending rich tradition with whimsy to achieve interiors that are as comfortable as they are stunning. Within these pages, acclaimed stylist Erin Swift offers a look at the exquisite homes of renowned designers, architects, and artists, simplifying the elements that define each room, such as color, art and furnishings, objects and accents, structure, and texture. Sharing the homeowner’s visions, she also highlights hundreds of fascinating and unconventional decorating details that you can draw inspiration from:

·         Hang vintage board games—or a collection of clocks, each set to the time in a favorite travel destination—on the wall
·         Balance impressive architecture with slipcovers in primary colors
·         Highlight antiques by tucking them into a kitchen or bathroom—and display crystal or a stack of books like everyday sculpture
·         Elevate a pitched ceiling or a corner with artwork to make an event out of a space that would otherwise be overlooked

Galleries featuring dozens of choices for molding, stone and tile flooring, frames, paint colors, doorknobs, and textiles offer even more ways to add a French touch.

With a comprehensive resource section, hundreds of photographs that will inspire those on any budget, and countless practical ideas, French Accents is the ultimate celebration of Parisian decorating in all of its ephemeral, individual, and incontrovertible style.

BOOKS I'VE READ

By Deborah Needleman
Virginia Johnson

ISBN: 9780770433840

Rating: 5.00 by 2 users

Description

For avid readers who see books as a vital part of their lives and homes, this beautifully illustrated reading journal is a decorative object in itself. Whether you read print books, ebooks, or a bit of both, Books I've Read will serve as a tangible keepsake of your reading experiences. The journal features an elegant three-piece case and is filled with Virginia Johnson's full-color illustrations of impressive home libraries and cozy reading corners from Deborah Needleman's home décor guide The Perfectly Imperfect Home. It also contains recommended reading lists from a variety of reputable sources (Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker, and National Book Award winners, Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, BBC's Best Novels, etc.), as well as prompts for making your own lists (Most Beautiful Books, Books I've Given as Gifts, Books I Loved as a Child).

MASTERMINDS AND WINGMEN

By Rosalind Wiseman

ISBN: 9780307986658

Rating: 4.03 by 95 users

Description

Here is a landmark book that reveals the way boys think and that shows parents, educators and coaches how to reach out and help boys overcome their most common yet difficult challenges -- by the bestselling author who changed our conception of adolescent girls.

Do you constantly struggle to pull information from your son, student, or athlete, only to encounter mumbling or evasive assurances such as “It’s nothing” or “I’m good?” Do you sense that the boy you care about is being bullied, but that he’ll do anything to avoid your “help?” Have you repeatedly reminded him that schoolwork and chores come before video games only to spy him reaching for the controller as soon as you leave the room? Have you watched with frustration as your boy flounders with girls?

Welcome to Boy World. It’s a place where asking for help or showing emotional pain often feels impossible. Where sports and video games can mean everything, but working hard in school frequently earns ridicule from “the guys” even as they ask to copy assignments. Where “masterminds” dominate and friends ruthlessly insult each other but can never object when someone steps over the line. Where hiding problems from adults is the ironclad rule because their involvement only makes situations worse.

Boy world is governed by social hierarchies and a powerful set of unwritten rules that have huge implications for your boy’s relationships, his interactions with you, and the man he’ll become. If you want what’s best for him, you need to know what these rules are and how to work with them effectively.

What you’ll find in Masterminds and Wingmen is critically important for every parent – or anyone who cares about boys – to know. Collaborating with a large team of middle- and high-school-age editors, Rosalind Wiseman has created an unprecedented guide to the life your boy is actually experiencing – his on-the-ground reality. Not only does Wiseman challenge you to examine your assumptions, she offers innovative coping strategies aimed at helping your boy develop a positive, authentic, and strong sense of self.

GOVERNESS OF HIGHLAND HALL

By Carrie Turansky

ISBN: 9781601424969

Rating: 4.31 by 135 users

Description

Worlds lie between the marketplaces of India and the halls of a magnificent country estate like Highland Hall. Will Julia be able to find her place when a governess is neither upstairs family nor downstairs help?

Missionary Julia Foster loves working alongside her parents, ministering and caring for young girls in India. But when the family must return to England due to illness, she readily accepts the burden for her parents’ financial support. Taking on a job at Highland Hall as governess, she quickly finds that teaching her four privileged, ill-mannered charges at a grand estate is more challenging than expected, and she isn’t sure what to make of the estate’s preoccupied master, Sir William Ramsey.

Widowed and left to care for his two young children and his deceased cousin Randolph’s two teenage girls, William is consumed with saving the estate from the financial ruin. The last thing he needs is any distraction coming from the kindhearted-yet-determined governess who seems to be quietly transforming his household with her persuasive personality, vibrant prayer life, and strong faith.

While both are tending past wounds and guarding fragile secrets, Julia and William are determined to do what it takes to save their families—common ground that proves fertile for unexpected feelings. But will William choose Julia’s steadfast heart and faith over the wealth and power he needs to secure Highland Hall’s future?

ALL-GIRL FILLING STATION'S

By Fannie Flagg

ISBN: 9781400065943

Rating: 4.14 by 203 users

Description

The one and only Fannie Flagg, beloved author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven, and I Still Dream About You, is at her hilarious and superb best in this new comic mystery novel about two women who are forced to reimagine who they are and what they are capable of.

Mrs. Sookie Poole of Point Clear, Alabama, has just married off the last of her three daughters and is looking forward to relaxing and perhaps traveling with her husband, Earle. The only thing left to contend with now is her mother, the formidable and imposing Lenore Simmons Krackenberry—never an easy task. Lenore may be a lot of fun for other people, but is, for the most part, an overbearing presence for her daughter. Then one day, quite by accident, Sookie discovers a shocking secret about her mother’s past that knocks her for a loop and suddenly calls into question everything she ever thought she knew about herself, her family, and her future.

Feeling like a stranger in her own life, and fearful of confronting her mother with questions, Sookie begins a search for answers that takes her to California, the Midwest, and back in time, to the 1940s, when an irrepressible woman named Fritzi takes on the job of running her family’s filling station. With so many men off to war, it’s up to Fritzi and her enterprising younger sisters to keep it going. Soon truck drivers are changing their routes to fill up at the All-Girl Filling Station. But before long, Fritzi sees an opportunity for an even more groundbreaking adventure when she receives a life-changing invitation from the U.S. military to assist in the war effort. As Sookie learns more and more about Fritzi’s story, she finds herself with new answers to the questions she’s been asking her whole life.

The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion is a perfect combination of comedy, mystery, wisdom, and charm. Fabulous, fun-loving, spanning decades, generations, and centered on a little-known aspect of America’s twentieth-century story, The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion is Fannie Flagg, the bestselling “born storyteller” (The New York Times Book Review), at her irresistible best.

FIRST SIGHT (LPTP)

By Danielle Steel

ISBN: 9780385363259

Rating: 3.29 by 4 users

Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Paris, L.A., and the world of ready to wear fashion provide rich backdrops for Danielle Steel’s deeply involving story of a gifted designer whose talent and drive have brought her everything—except the ability to erase her past and trust relationships.

FIRST SIGHT

New York. London. Milan. Paris. Fashion Week in all four cities. A month of endless interviews, parties, and unflagging work and attention to detail at the semiannual ready to wear fashion shows—the famous prêt-à-porter. At the center of the storm and avalanche of work is American Timmie O’Neill, whose renowned line, Timmie O, is the embodiment of casual chic, in fashion and for the home. She has created a business that inspires, fills, and consumes her life.

With an unerring instinct for what the next trend will be, an innate genius for business, tireless labor, and sheer fearlessness, starting from nothing, over two decades Timmie has built an international empire that has brought her enormous satisfaction and success. In a world where humility and compassion are all too rare, her humor, kindness, integrity, and creativity are inspirational. Yet as blessed as she feels by her success, Timmie harbors the private wounds of a devastating childhood and past tragedy. She is too smart, too experienced, and too hurt to want much in her personal life beyond a succession of convenient, very limited relationships. Always willing to take risks in business, she never risks her heart.

But despite her well-ordered and highly controlled world, it turns out that Timmie O’Neill is not immune to magic when it strikes. And it strikes in Paris during Paris Fashion Week, when an intriguing Frenchman comes into her life when she gets sick. At first, Timmie and Jean-Charles Vernier are only patient and physician. They become confidants and friends, corresponding at a safe distance between Paris and Los Angeles once she goes home. There is every reason why they must remain apart. But neither can deny their growing friendship and the electricity that sparks whenever they meet.

First Sight is as complex and compelling as modern life itself. Careers, families, histories, losses, duty, obligation, and fear of losing control and getting hurt. It is a tale of daring to take risks, and losing control just enough to have a life, when the opportunity presents itself. When two very different worlds and strong-willed people collide, everything changes in an instant, as they confront the age-old question of whether to lay oneself bare and risk intimacy—or not. Are they brave enough to face what comes next? And will they do it together or apart?

KISSING LIST, THE

By Stephanie Reents

ISBN: 9780307951830

Rating: 2.88 by 4 users

Description

An inventive debut that recalls the imagination of Aimee Bender and the sardonic wit of Lorrie Moore.

The interlocking stories in The Kissing List feature an unforgettable group of young women – Sylvie, Anna, Frances, Maureen – as their lives connect, first during a year abroad at Oxford, then later as they move to New York on the cusp of adulthood. We follow each of them as they navigate the treachery of first dates, temp jobs and roommates, failed relationships and unexpected affairs – all the things that make their lives seem full of possibility, but also rife with potential disappointment.

Shot through with laugh-out-loud lines, yet still wrenchingly emotional and resonant, The Kissing List is a book about women who bravely defy expectations and take outrageous chances in the face of a life that might turn out to be anything less than extraordinary.

From the Hardcover edition.

WINNERS

By Danielle Steel

ISBN: 9780385343220

Rating: 4.13 by 140 users

Description

Acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel delivers her most moving, emotionally charged novel yet, in which lives are transformed after a series of heartbreaking accidents, and healing is achieved through the redemptive power of hope and love.

When a horrific chairlift accident leaves 17-year-old competitive skier Lily Thomas paralyzed, she must come to grips with the fact that she'll not only be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, but will never fulfill her lifelong dream of winning Olympic gold. Meanwhile, her wealthy father, who has doted on Lily since her mother died when she was three, is devastated as he watches his only child lose all she once cherished and suffer through the arduous road to recovery. But just as all hope seems lost, Lily meets Teddy, a young man even more badly injured than she, but as doggedly determined to live an enriching life. Danielle Steel is at her best in this powerful story of a father and daughter triumphing together over unthinkable tragedy, creating new lives for themselves and providing hope for others along the way.

GAME OF THRONES 5-COPY BOX

By George R.R. Martin

ISBN: 9780345535566

Rating: 4.62 by 15 users

Description

For the first time, all five novels in the epic fantasy series that inspired HBO's "Game of Thrones "are together in one boxed set. An immersive entertainment experience unlike any other, A Song of Ice and Fire has earned George R. R. Martin--dubbed "the American Tolkien" by "Time" magazine--international acclaim and millions of loyal readers. Now here is the entire monumental cycle:
A GAME OF THRONES
A CLASH OF KINGS
A STORM OF SWORDS
A FEAST OF CROWS
A DANCE WITH DRAGONS
"One of the best series in the history of fantasy."--"Los Angeles Times"
" "
Winter is coming. Such is the stern motto of House Stark, the northernmost of the fiefdoms that owe allegiance to King Robert Baratheon in far-off King's Landing. There Eddard Stark of Winterfell rules in Robert's name. There his family dwells in peace and comfort: his proud wife, Catelyn; his sons Robb, Brandon, and Rickon; his daughters Sansa and Arya; and his bastard son, Jon Snow. Far to the north, behind the towering Wall, lie savage Wildings and worse--unnatural things relegated to myth during the centuries-long summer, but proving all too real and all too deadly in the turning of the season.
Yet a more immediate threat lurks to the south, where Jon Arryn, the Hand of the King, has died under mysterious circumstances. Now Robert is riding north to Winterfell, bringing his queen, the lovely but cold Cersei, his son, the cruel, vainglorious Prince Joffrey, and the queen's brothers Jaime and Tyrion of the powerful and wealthy House Lannister--the first a swordsman without equal, the second a dwarf whose stunted stature belies a brilliant mind. All are heading for Winterfell and a fateful encounter that will change the course of kingdoms.
Meanwhile, across the Narrow Sea, Prince Viserys, heir of the fallen House Targaryen, which once ruled all of Westeros, schemes to reclaim the throne with an army of barbarian Dothraki--whose loyalty he will purchase in the only coin left to him: his beautiful yet innocent sister, Daenerys.
" "
"Long live George Martin . . . a literary dervish, enthralled by complicated characters and vivid language, and bursting with the wild vision of the very best tale tellers.""--The New York Times"

LANDS OF ICE AND FIRE, THE

By George R.R. Martin
Jonathan Roberts

ISBN: 9780345538543

Rating: 4.38 by 168 users

Description

George R. R. Martin’s beloved Song of Ice and Fire series, which started with A Game of Thrones, is bursting with a variety and richness of landscapes—from bitter tundra to arid wasteland and everything in between—that provide a sense of scale unrivaled in contemporary fantasy. Now this dazzling set of maps, featuring original artwork from illustrator and cartographer Jonathan Roberts, transforms Martin’s epic saga into a world as fully realized as the one around us.

The centerpiece of this gorgeous collection is guaranteed to be a must-have for any fan: the complete map of the known world, joining the lands of the Seven Kingdoms and the lands across the Narrow Sea for the first time in series history. But this is just one of many unique maps that aren’t available anywhere else. There is an alternate version that tracks the movements of the series’ protagonists throughout their vast world, along with more detailed versions of the western, middle, and eastern thirds of the world; a full map of Westeros, combining North and South; one of the Dothraki Sea and the Red Wastes; and the Braavos city map. And here, too, are fan favorites detailing everything from urban sprawl to untamed wilds: maps of King’s Landing; The Wall and Beyond the Wall; the Free Cities; and Slaver’s Bay, Valyria, and Sothyros.

Never before has the entire scope of Martin’s universe been so exhaustively and fascinatingly depicted. The maps in this beautiful, one-of-a-kind atlas will enrich your reading or viewing experience, provide another view of your favorite characters’ epic journeys, and open up captivating new worlds—plus, they’ll look great on any castle wall.

SHADOW COUNTRY

By Peter Matthiessen

ISBN: 9780679640196

Rating: 4.00 by 1692 users

Description

2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.

Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.

Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."

Peter Matthiessen’s lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more."

Praise for Shadow Country
“Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth–as well as the capstone to the career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time.” — The New York Review of Books

“Magnificent and capacious…. I'll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go. Matthiessen has made his three-part saga into a new thing…. Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate….a breathtaking saga.” — The Los Angeles Times

“Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, Shadow Country is the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen’s] career, every bit as ambitious as Moby Dick.” — National Geographic Adventure magazine

“Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida -- and crafts something even better…[He] deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature….Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel.” — Miami Herald

“Matthiessen is writing about one man's life in Shadow Country, but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course of half a century. Watson's story is essentially the story of the American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and of what such empires cost….Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book.” — St. Petersburg Times

“Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation.” --Seattle Times

“Shadow Country” is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of literature that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr. Matthiessen’s integrity as an artist that he felt compelled to return to the Watson material to produce this work and satisfy his original vision….a multifaceted work that can be read variously or simultaneously as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a morality tale, a political allegory, or a mystery. -- East Hampton Star

“Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American literature…this reworking…is remarkable….Where Watson was a magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of iconic here; it’s difficult to find another figure in American literature so thoroughly and confincingly portrayed.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review, Pick of the Week
“Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy’s novels…a mosaic about the life and lynch-mob death of a turn-of-the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial killer named E. J. Watson — into the 900-plus-page Shadow Country. This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were cut from the novels, previous background characters now tromp to the foreground, and the books’ rangy, Faulknerian essence is rendered more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick porterhouse of a novel.” — Men’s Journal
"The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. SHADOW COUNTRY lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great writing." -- Richard Ford
"Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious writer, an inspired anatomist of the American mythos. His storytelling skills are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable." -- Joyce Carol Oates
"Peter Matthiessen's work, both in fiction and non-fiction, has become a unique achievement in his own generation and in American literature as a whole. Everything that he has written has been conveyed in his own clear, deeply informed, elegant and powerful prose. The Watson saga-in-the-round, to which he has devoted nearly thirty years, is his crowning achievement. SHADOW COUNTRY, his distillation of the earlier trilogy, is his transmutation of it to represent his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy." -- W.S. Merwin

SONGS OF WILLOW FROST

By Jamie Ford

ISBN: 9780345522023

Rating: 3.74 by 2138 users

Description

Twelve-year-old William Eng, a Chinese-American boy, has lived at Seattle’s Sacred Heart Orphanage ever since his mother’s listless body was carried away from their small apartment five years ago. On his birthday—or rather, the day the nuns designate as his birthday—William and the other orphans are taken to the historical Moore Theatre, where William glimpses an actress on the silver screen who goes by the name of Willow Frost. Struck by her features, William is convinced that the movie star is his mother, Liu Song.

Determined to find Willow, and prove his mother is still alive, William escapes from Sacred Heart with his friend Charlotte. The pair navigates the streets of Seattle, where they must not only survive, but confront the mysteries of William’s past and his connection to the exotic film star. The story of Willow Frost, however, is far more complicated than the Hollywood fantasy William sees onscreen.

Shifting between the Great Depression and the 1920s, Songs of Willow Frost takes readers on an emotional journey of discovery. Jamie Ford’s sweeping book will resonate with anyone who has ever longed for the comforts of family and a place to call home.

CARRIE (ESPANOL/MTI)

By Stephen King

ISBN: 9780345806307

Rating: 3.82 by 1 users

Description

The story of misfit high-school girl, Carrie White, who gradually discovers that she has telekinetic powers. Repressed by a domineering, ultra-religious mother and tormented by her peers at school, her efforts to fit in lead to a dramatic confrontation during the senior prom.

MAX BROOKS BOXED SET

By Max Brooks

ISBN: 9780804137881

Rating: 4.50 by 8 users

Description

Just in time for the release of the blockbuster Summer movie, World War Z, this boxed set includes two "New York Times" bestsellers from Max Brooks: "World War Z" and "The Zombie Survival Guide." The box features line art from the graphic novel, " Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks."

BRIDGET JONES: LOCA POR EL

By Helen Fielding

ISBN: 9780804169509

Rating: 3.41 by 0 users

Description

Cuando Helen Fielding escribió El diario de Bridget Jones, narrando la vida de una mujer que rebasaba los treinta años en los años 90, introdujo a los lectores a uno de los personajes más queridos de la literatura moderna. El libro fue publicado en cuarenta países, vendió más de quince millones de copias, y abrió el camino para su secuela, Bridget Jones: Al borde de la razón. Los dos libros fueron hechos películas protagonizadas por Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, y Colin Firth.

Con la tercera, Bridget Jones: Loca por él, Fielding nos introduce a una etapa completamente nueva y emocionante en la vida de Bridget. Con Londres de fondo, vemos como Bridget se enfrenta a la vida moderna: sms borrachos, skinny jeans, el desastre del correo con copia, zero seguidores en Twitter, y una tele que necesita tres remotos para encenderla.

Una novela divertidísima, hilarante y moderna, Bridget Jones: Loca por él es el regreso triunfal de nuestra querida amiga.

AND SONS

By David Gilbert

ISBN: 9780812993967

Rating: 3.54 by 1036 users

Description

The funeral of Charles Henry Topping on Manhattan’s Upper East Side would have been a minor affair (his two-hundred-word obit in The New York Times notwithstanding) but for the presence of one particular mourner: the notoriously reclusive author A. N. Dyer, whose novel Ampersand stands as a classic of American teenage angst. But as Andrew Newbold Dyer delivers the eulogy for his oldest friend, he suffers a breakdown over the life he’s led and the people he’s hurt and the novel that will forever endure as his legacy. He must gather his three sons for the first time in many years—before it’s too late.

So begins a wild, transformative, heartbreaking week, as witnessed by Philip Topping, who, like his late father, finds himself caught up in the swirl of the Dyer family. First there’s son Richard, a struggling screenwriter and father, returning from self-imposed exile in California. In the middle lingers Jamie, settled in Brooklyn after his twenty-year mission of making documentaries about human suffering. And last is Andy, the half brother whose mysterious birth tore the Dyers apart seventeen years ago, now in New York on spring break, determined to lose his virginity before returning to the prestigious New England boarding school that inspired Ampersand. But only when the real purpose of this reunion comes to light do these sons realize just how much is at stake, not only for their father but for themselves and three generations of their family.

ANNOTATED NORTHANGER ABBEY, TH

By Jane Austen
David M. Shapard

ISBN: 9780307390806

Rating: 3.74 by 2 users

Description

Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen's amusing and bitingly satirical pastiche of the 'Gothic' romances popular in her day.

Catherine Morland, an unremarkable tomboy as a child, is thrown amongst all the 'difficulties and dangers' of Bath at the ripe age of seventeen. Armed with an unworldly charm and a vivid imagination, she must overcome the caprices of elegant society, encountering along the way such characters as the vacuous Mrs Allen, coquettish Isabella and the brash bully John Thorpe. Catherine's invitation to Northanger Abbey, in her eyes a haven of coffins, skeletons and other Gothic devices, does lead to an adventure, though one she didn't expect, and her misjudgement of the ambitious, somewhat villainous General Tilney is not wholly unjustified. However, with the aid of the 'unromantic' hero Henry Tilney, Catherine gradually progresses towards maturity and self-knowledge.

AS SWEET AS HONEY

By Indira Ganesan

ISBN: 9780307950611

Rating: 3.52 by 0 users

Description

Once thought to be destined for spinsterhood, Aunt Meterling seems to have found love at last with a short, elegant Englishman who wears white suits. But while all the tongues on the small island of Pi start to wag as soon as their engagement is announced, even the most stalwart of the gossips is shocked when the wedding ends in tragedy and Meterling is left widowed and pregnant.

The family, from its children to its grandmother, does its best to keep a watchful eye over the grieving expectant mother. Still, when the groom's cousin arrives from England and a new romance blossoms, no one knows how to react, least of all Meterling herself, who is suddenly torn between respecting tradition and taking the first few steps toward a new life.

CUENTOS DE NAVIDAD

By Charles Dickens

ISBN: 9780345805492

Rating: 3.92 by 0 users

Description

Se podría decir que Dickens inventó la Navidad, pues ningún otro escritor ha evocado con tanta maestría el espíritu, jubiloso y elegíaco a un tiempo, de ese periodo final del año.Además del célebre"Canción de Navidad", se reúnen en este volumen"inspirado en la edición inglesa de 1852"otros cuatro relatos de ambientación navideña donde se entreveran los motivos principales del mundo dickensiano: la caridad, la infancia, los mitos populares, las desigualdades sociales, lossueños y la magia, bellamente iluminados por Javier Olivares.

DUAL INHERITANCE, A (UAB)(CD)

By Joanna Hershon

ISBN: 9780385360555

Rating: 3.56 by 3 users

Description

For readers of Rules of Civility and The Marriage Plot, Joanna Hershon’s A Dual Inheritance is an engrossing novel of passion, friendship, betrayal, and class—and their reverberations across generations.

Autumn 1962: Ed Cantowitz and Hugh Shipley meet in their final year at Harvard. Ed is far removed from Hugh’s privileged upbringing as a Boston Brahmin, yet his drive and ambition outpace Hugh’s ambivalence about his own life. These two young men form an unlikely friendship, bolstered by a fierce shared desire to transcend their circumstances. But in just a few short years, not only do their paths diverge—one rising on Wall Street, the other becoming a kind of global humanitarian—but their friendship ends abruptly, with only one of them understanding why.

Can a friendship define your view of the world? Spanning from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the present-day stock market collapse, with locations as diverse as Dar es Salaam, Boston, Shenzhen, and Fishers Island, A Dual Inheritance asks this question, as it follows not only these two men, but the complicated women in their vastly different lives. And as Ed and Hugh grow farther and farther apart, they remain uniquely—even surprisingly—connected.

Advance praise for A Dual Inheritance

“Joanna Hershon has written a vivid, elegant novel that deftly roams the decades and the globe in telling a story about friendship, family, and the murky area in between. A Dual Inheritance is a rich and satisfying read.”—Maggie Shipstead, author of Seating Arrangements

“Simultaneously a riveting story of two very different families and a portrait of the United States through the boom and bust decades . . . Think of Anne Tyler and Tom Wolfe, both. This marvelous novel is a mix of heartache and history. I just couldn’t stop reading, and when it was over I felt sad the experience had ended.”—Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver

“Joanna Hershon is further evidence of a pleasing trend set off by Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot: big books about American politics, social customs, and family dynamics that seek to update and relocate the brilliantly compelling English nineteenth-century novel. I envy and admire Hershon’s ability to so convincingly display the complex intimacies of multigenerational love and friendship. This is a book to lose yourself in.”—Antonya Nelson, author of Bound

“Wise, heartfelt, and beautifully written, A Dual Inheritance is about the big things: love, work, family, money. It earns its ambitions and is astonishingly good. I just loved this novel.”—Joshua Henkin, author of The World Without You

“A Dual Inheritance is deep and beautiful and humane. It has a massive scope and a social conscience, and yet is also incredibly intimate. What an accomplished novel; it truly took my breath away.”—Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers

“This brilliant family saga captured me from its opening lines and kept me pinned to the couch—by turns laughing and sobbing—until I’d reached its stunning, satisfying conclusion. It calls to mind The Corrections and The Emperor’s Children, as well as Cheever and Michener and Potok, but this is also a novel squarely in the tradition of Victorian social realism, of Eliot and Galsworthy and Dickens.”—Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age

From the Hardcover edition.

GREAT SANTINI, THE

By Pat Conroy

ISBN: 9780553381559

Rating: 4.06 by 338 users

Description

Step into the powerhouse life of Bull Meecham. He’s all Marine—fighter pilot, king of the clouds, and absolute ruler of his family. Lillian is his wife—beautiful, southern-bred, with a core of velvet steel. Without her cool head, her kids would be in real trouble. Ben is the oldest, a born athlete whose best never satisfies the big man. Ben’s got to stand up, even fight back, against a father who doesn’t give in—not to his men, not to his wife, and certainly not to his son. Bull Meecham is undoubtedly Pat Conroy’s most explosive character—a man you should hate, but a man you will love.

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SISTERLAND

By Curtis Sittenfeld

ISBN: 9781400068319

Rating: 3.47 by 9695 users

Description

Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, returns with a mesmerizing novel of family and identity, loyalty and deception, and the delicate line between truth and belief.

From an early age, Kate and her identical twin sister, Violet, knew that they were unlike everyone else. Kate and Vi were born with peculiar “senses”—innate psychic abilities concerning future events and other people’s secrets. Though Vi embraced her visions, Kate did her best to hide them.

Now, years later, their different paths have led them both back to their hometown of St. Louis. Vi has pursued an eccentric career as a psychic medium, while Kate, a devoted wife and mother, has settled down in the suburbs to raise her two young children. But when a minor earthquake hits in the middle of the night, the normal life Kate has always wished for begins to shift. After Vi goes on television to share a premonition that another, more devastating earthquake will soon hit the St. Louis area, Kate is mortified. Equally troubling, however, is her fear that Vi may be right. As the date of the predicted earthquake quickly approaches, Kate is forced to reconcile her fraught relationship with her sister and to face truths about herself she’s long tried to deny.

Funny, haunting, and thought-provoking, Sisterland is a beautifully written novel of the obligation we have toward others, and the responsibility we take for ourselves. With her deep empathy, keen wisdom, and unerring talent for finding the extraordinary moments in our everyday lives, Curtis Sittenfeld is one of the most exceptional voices in literary fiction today.

BIG BOOK OF CHRISTMAS MYSTERIE

By Otto Penzler

ISBN: 9780345802989

Rating: 4.36 by 11 users

Description

Have yourself a crooked little Christmas with The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.

Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories--many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant.

Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey and Max Allan Collins; O. Henry-like stories by Stanley Ellin and Joseph Shearing, stories by pulp icons John D. MacDonald and Damon Runyon; comic gems from Donald E. Westlake and John Mortimer; and many, many more. Almost any kind of mystery you’re in the mood for--suspense, pure detection, humor, cozy, private eye, or police procedural—can be found in these pages.

FEATURING:
-        Unscrupulous Santas
-        Crimes of Christmases Past and Present
-        Festive felonies
-        Deadly puddings
-        Misdemeanors under the mistletoe
-        Christmas cases for classic characters including Sherlock Holmes, Brother Cadfael, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Rumpole of the Bailey, Inspector Morse, Inspector Ghote, A.J. Raffles, and Nero Wolfe.

GONE GIRL

By Gillian Flynn

ISBN: 9780307588364

Rating: 3.93 by 19422 users

Description

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick's clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn't doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife's head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media--as well as Amy's fiercely doting parents--the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he's definitely bitter--but is he really a killer?
As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn't do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

By E.L. James

ISBN: 9780385537674

Rating: 3.62 by 10 users

Description

When literature student Anastasia Steele goes to interview young entrepreneur Christian Grey, she encounters a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating. The unworldly, innocent Ana is startled to realize she wants this man and, despite his enigmatic reserve, finds she is desperate to get close to him. Unable to resist Ana’s quiet beauty, wit, and independent spirit, Grey admits he wants her, too—but on his own terms.

Shocked yet thrilled by Grey’s singular erotic tastes, Ana hesitates. For all the trappings of success—his multinational businesses, his vast wealth, his loving family—Grey is a man tormented by demons and consumed by the need to control. When the couple embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair, Ana discovers Christian Grey’s secrets and explores her own dark desires.

Erotic, amusing, and deeply moving, the Fifty Shades Trilogy is a tale that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever.

This book is intended for mature audiences.

STARRY NIGHT

By Debbie Macomber

ISBN: 9780345528896

Rating: 3.94 by 577 users

Description

’Tis the season for romance, second chances, and Christmas cheer with this new novel from Debbie Macomber.

Carrie Slayton, a big-city society-page columnist, longs to write more serious news stories. So her editor hands her a challenge: She can cover any topic she wants, but only if she first scores the paper an interview with Finn Dalton, the notoriously reclusive author.

Living in the remote Alaskan wilderness, Finn has written a mega-bestselling memoir about surviving in the wild. But he stubbornly declines to speak to anyone in the press, and no one even knows exactly where he lives.

Digging deep into Finn’s past, Carrie develops a theory on his whereabouts. It is the holidays, but her career is at stake, so she forsakes her family celebrations and flies out to snowy Alaska. When she finally finds Finn, she discovers a man both more charismatic and more stubborn than she even expected. And soon she is torn between pursuing the story of a lifetime and following her heart.

Filled with all the comforts and joys of Christmastime, Starry Night is a delightful novel of finding happiness in the most surprising places.

READY PLAYER ONE

By Ernest Cline

ISBN: 9780307887443

Rating: 4.29 by 2440 users

Description

It's the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune--and remarkable power--to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday's riddles are based in the pop culture he loved--that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday's icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes's oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt--among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life--and love--in the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.

A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?

OLD MARS

By George R.R. Martin
Gardner R. Dozois

ISBN: 9780345537270

Rating: 3.53 by 4 users

Description

Fifteen all-new stories by science fiction’s top talents, collected by bestselling author George R. R. Martin and multiple-award winning editor Gardner Dozois

Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars. Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Heinlein’s Red Planet. These and so many more inspired generations of readers with a sense that science fiction’s greatest wonders did not necessarily lie far in the future or light-years across the galaxy but were to be found right now on a nearby world tantalizingly similar to our own—a red planet that burned like an ember in our night sky . . . and in our imaginations.

This new anthology of fifteen all-original science fiction stories, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, celebrates the Golden Age of Science Fiction, an era filled with tales of interplanetary colonization and derring-do. Before the advent of powerful telescopes and space probes, our solar system could be imagined as teeming with strange life-forms and ancient civilizations—by no means always friendly to the dominant species of Earth. And of all the planets orbiting that G-class star we call the Sun, none was so steeped in an aura of romantic decadence, thrilling mystery, and gung-ho adventure as Mars.

Join such seminal contributors as Michael Moorcock, Mike Resnick, Joe R. Lansdale, S. M. Stirling, Mary Rosenblum, Ian McDonald, Liz Williams, James S. A. Corey, and others in this brilliant retro anthology that turns its back on the cold, all-but-airless Mars of the Mariner probes and instead embraces an older, more welcoming, more exotic Mars: a planet of ancient canals cutting through red deserts studded with the ruined cities of dying races.

FEATURING ALL-NEW STORIES BY

James S. A. Corey • Phyllis Eisenstein • Matthew Hughes • Joe R. Lansdale • David D. Levine • Ian McDonald • Michael Moorcock • Mike Resnick • Chris Roberson • Mary Rosenblum • Melinda Snodgrass • Allen M. Steele • S. M. Stirling • Howard Waldrop • Liz Williams

And an Introduction by George R. R. Martin!

ANDALUCIAN FRIEND, THE (LPTP)

By Alexander Söderberg

ISBN: 9780307990921

Rating: 3.16 by 5 users

Description

A Monumental International Crime Thriller That Brad Thor Calls "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meets The Sopranos."

Enemies Are Everywhere

When Sophie Brinkmann—nurse, widow, single mother—meets Hector Guzman, her life is uneventful. She likes his quiet charm and easy smile; she likes the way he welcomes her into his family. She quickly learns, though, that his smooth façade masks something much more sinister.
Guzman is the head of a powerful international crime ring with a reach into drugs and weapons that extends from Europe to South America. His interests are under siege by a ruthless German syndicate who will stop at nothing to stake their claim. But the Guzmans are fighters and will go to war to protect what’s rightfully theirs. The conflict quickly escalates to become a deadly turf war between the rival organizations that includes an itinerant arms dealer, a deeply disturbed detective, a vicious hit man, and a wily police chief. Sophie, too, is unwittingly caught in the middle. She must summon everything within her to navigate this intricate web of moral ambiguity, deadly obsession, and craven gamesmanship.
The Andalucian Friend is a powerhouse of a novel—turbo-charged, action-packed, highly sophisticated, and epic in scope—and announces Alexander Söderberg as the most exciting new voice in thrillers in a generation.

DEXTER'S FINAL CUT

By Jeff Lindsay

ISBN: 9780385536516

Rating: 3.59 by 589 users

Description

With 1.7 million copies of the Dexter novels sold, and ever-increasing critical acclaim, Jeff Lindsay returns to his groundbreaking and beloved character with his most entertaining book yet. Get ready for a grisly send-up of Hollywood, and a full dose of dark Dexter wit.

Lights. Camera. Mayhem. You won't find this story on television.

Hollywood gets more than it bargained for when television's hottest star arrives at the Miami Police Department and develops an intense, professional interest in a camera-shy blood spatter analyst named Dexter Morgan.

Mega-star Robert Chase is famous for losing himself in his characters. When he and a group of actors descend on the Miami Police Department for "research," Chase becomes fixated on Dexter Morgan, the blood spatter analyst with a sweet tooth for doughnuts and a seemingly average life. To perfect his role, Chase is obsessed with shadowing Dexter's every move and learning what really makes him tick. There is just one tiny problem . . . Dexter's favorite hobby involves hunting down the worst killers to escape legal justice, and introducing them to his special brand of playtime. It's a secret best kept out of the spotlight and away from the prying eyes of bloated Hollywood egos if Dexter wants to stay out of the electric chair. The last thing he needs is bright lights and the paparazzi. . . but even Dexter isn't immune to the call of fame.

Jeff Lindsay's razor sharp, devilish wit, and immaculate pacing prove that he is in a class of his own, and this new novel is his most masterful creation yet.

TIME TO KILL, A

By John Grisham

ISBN: 9780385470810

Rating: 3.91 by 574 users

Description

Before The Firm and  The Pelican Brief made him a superstar,  John Grisham wrote this riveting story of  retribution and justice -- at last it's available in a  Doubleday hardcover edition. In this searing courtroom  drama, best-selling author John Grisham probes the  savage depths of racial violence...as he delivers  a compelling tale of uncertain justice in a small  southern town...Clanton, Mississippi.

The life of a ten-year-old girl is shattered by two  drunken and remorseless young man. The mostly  white town reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman  crime. Until her black father acquires an assault  rifle -- and takes justice into his own outraged  hands.

For ten days, as burning crosses  and the crack of sniper fire spread through the  streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as  young defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save  his client's life...and then his own...

NEVER GO BACK

By Lee Child

ISBN: 9780385344340

Rating: 3.95 by 3164 users

Description

After an epic and interrupted journey all the way from the snows of South Dakota, former military cop Jack Reacher has finally made it to Virginia. His destination: a sturdy stone building a short bus ride from Washington D.C., the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th MP. It was the closest thing to a home he ever had.

Why? He wants to meet the new commanding officer, Major Susan Turner. He liked her voice on the phone. But the officer sitting behind his old desk isn’t a woman. Is Susan Turner dead? In Afghanistan? Or in a car wreck?

What Reacher doesn't expect to hear is that Turner has just been fired from her command. Nor that he himself is in big trouble, accused of a sixteen-year-old homicide. And he certainly doesn't expect to hear these words: ‘You’re back in the army, Major. And your ass is mine.’

Will he be sorry he went back? Or – will someone else?

2-DAY DIET, THE

By Michelle Harvie
Tony Howell

ISBN: 9780804138406

Rating: 2.00 by 1 users

Description

Lose weight fast with the international diet sensation. Diet two days a week. Eat the Mediterranean way for five.

The 2-Day Diet is easy to follow, easy to stick to, and clinically tested. Simply eat a low carb, high protein diet two days a week, and follow the classic Mediterranean Diet (now recognized as the gold standard in warding off heart disease) for the other five.

The 2-Day Diet is designed to maximize weight loss, minimize muscle loss and keep you feeling full. It can have dramatic anti-aging and anti-cancer benefits. With this diet you can finally be slim, fit and healthy. With meal plans and 100 delicious and filling recipes.

“A far more effective way to lose weight.” –Daily Mail

“Put an end to 24/7 calorie counting.” – The Sun

“Revolutionary and clinically proven.” –Good Housekeeping

FAST METABOLISM DIET, THE

By Haylie Pomroy

ISBN: 9780307986276

Rating: 3.81 by 171 users

Description

None

BOMBSHELL

By Suzanne Somers

ISBN: 9780307588555

Rating: 4.01 by 1 users

Description

For the millions of fans who've made Suzanne Somers a bestselling author for years: the huge numbers of boomers and the post-40 crowd of health consumers interested in aging gracefully, successfully, and beautifully

This groundbreaking new book aims to redefine aging as we know it. And who better to do it than Suzanne Somers, bestselling phenomenon, health pioneer, and the face of anti-aging medicine. Here she interviews future medicine's best and brightest to craft a plan that will reshape the way we treat, approach, and think about aging. Forget anti-aging; this is the next step: embracing it, looking forward to it, and enjoying it. Definitely "pro"-aging.

WAR, THE

By Geoffrey C. Ward
Ken Burns

ISBN: 9780307262837

Rating: 4.27 by 371 users

Description

The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced—and helped to win—the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost.

Focusing on the citizens of four towns— Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama;—The War follows more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the compelling, unflinching narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. All the iconic events are here, from Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps—but we also move among prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together while their men were shipped off to Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa.

Enriched by maps and hundreds of photographs, including many never published before, this is an intimate, profoundly affecting chronicle of the war that shaped our world.

WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, THE

By Isabel Wilkerson

ISBN: 9780679444329

Rating: 4.29 by 12628 users

Description

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

SHAPING OUR NATION

By Michael Barone

ISBN: 9780307461513

Rating: 5.00 by 1 users

Description

New York Times bestselling author, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Fox News contributor Michael Barone reveals the power and lasting influence of migrations on American history, economics, politics, and culture over the last three centuries.

If you could be transported back in time 400 years and view the world in 1600, you would find most of the concentrations of population--China, India, the Muslim world, Western Europe, and Russia--very familiar. But North America then was vastly different from today. It was not vacant, but Indian civilizations had only the slightest of connections to the more advanced societies of Europe and Asia, and their peoples were to suffer from enormous depopulation due to diseases for which they had no immunity.

In their place today, in vivid contrast with the years around 1600, is a nation with 5 percent of the world's population that produces 25 percent of its economic product and deploys more than 50 percent of its military capacity, a nation in which only 1 percent of its current population claims ancestry from the peoples variously called American Indians or Native Americans. The United States is by definition the cumulative product of successive migrations, first from across the oceans and then also within the nation itself. This book tells the story of how surges of migration of great magnitude shaped and reshaped America.

30 YEARS OF LAUGHS AND LASAGNA

By Jim Davis

ISBN: 9780345503794

Rating: 4.49 by 77 users

Description

“If Garfield ever lost weight, I’d lose my job security.”
–Jim Davis

When the world’s most famous feline hits the three-decade milestone it’s time to celebrate! 30 Years of Laughs & Lasagna is a tribute to this tremendous achievement. Organized by decade, each with an introduction by Jim Davis, this lavishly illustrated volume features more than four hundred strips, including thirty of Jim Davis’s all-time favorites–with informative remarks from Jim on why they made the grade. Packed with early sketches, enlightening quotes, and fun facts (did you know that the Garfield comic was originally titled Jon?), this book shows how Garfield evolved from a witty kitty to a world-renowned fat cat.

Of Jim Davis’s “little hobby,” Blondie cartoonist Dean Young writes: “Every one of [these] little treasures is an exquisite menagerie of comic timing, writing, and cartoon art. It’s easy to see why his strip is continually voted one of the best on our planet by readers everywhere.”

So if you appreciate the unparalleled splendors of layered pasta, need something to ward off those nap attacks, or have a healthy appetite for humor, 30 Years of Laughs & Lasagna is just the ticket. Perhaps Jim Davis puts it best: “This whole line of work is to make people happy and smile.” Garfield’s millions of fans couldn’t agree more.

ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS

By Justin Valmassoi

ISBN: 9780385347648

Rating: 3.60 by 11 users

Description

A goat who wants to sell you some meth.
A giraffe who might be violating his restraining order.
An alpaca with a very dirty secret.
A cat who’s really mad at you for cancelling Netflix instant.

These are just a few of the hilariously human animals you’ll meet in Animals Talking in All Caps. Inspired by the wildly popular blog of the same name and including some of the site’s best-loved entries as well as gobs of never-before-seen material, these pages provide a brilliantly unhinged glimpse into the animal mind.

HENRI, LE CHAT NOIR

By William Braden

ISBN: 9781607745105

Rating: 4.28 by 131 users

Description

This gift book is a collection of photos and quotes from Henri, the existential cat whose ennui has captivated people all over the world. Through his series of short films and interactions with an enthusiastic online community, Henri's contemplation and disillusion with the world has struck a chord with millions of fans. Now, finally, we have a collection of Henri's musings in his own words featuring never-before-seen photos and quotes. This book is a window into the tortured soul of the world's first feline philosopher.

AWKWARD FAMILY HOLIDAY PHOTOS

By Mike Bender
Doug Chernack

ISBN: 9780307888136

Rating: 3.33 by 6 users

Description

From the authors of the New York Times bestsellers Awkward Family Photos and Awkward Family Pet Photos comes a celebration of those special times throughout the year when our families embarrass us the most . . . the holidays.

Holidays. They’re those momentous occasions when we gather with family to eat, drink, celebrate, and, of course, pose for photographs. From Mom’s homemade Halloween costumes to re-creating a Nativity scene for the Christmas card to that overly patriotic uncle who literally wears the flag on the Fourth, holidays make for humiliating memories that we carry in our hearts for years to come. Whether your family loves Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, July Fourth, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Hanukkah, this book pays homage to all of the holidays’ most uncomfortable moments.

DAD IS FAT

By Jim Gaffigan

ISBN: 9780385349055

Rating: 3.66 by 353 users

Description

In Dad is Fat, stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan, who’s best known for his legendary riffs on Hot Pockets, bacon, manatees, and McDonald's, expresses all the joys and horrors of life with five young children—everything from cousins ("celebrities for little kids") to toddlers’ communication skills (“they always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours to deliver important news”), to the eating habits of four year olds (“there is no difference between a four year old eating a taco and throwing a taco on the floor”). Reminiscent of Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood, Dad is Fat is sharply observed, explosively funny, and a cry for help from a man who has realized he and his wife are outnumbered in their own home.

DROWNED VAULT, THE (ASHB#2)

By N.D. Wilson

ISBN: 9780375863974

Rating: 4.23 by 6 users

Description

Fans of both Percy Jackson and Indiana Jones will be captivated by the lost civilizations, ancient secrets, and buried treasure found in the second book of the Ashtown Burials series, an action-packed adventure by N. D. Wilson, the author of Leepike Ridge and the 100 Cupboards trilogy.

It's been almost a year since Cyrus and Antigone Smith earned their places as Journeymen at Ashtown, home of an ancient order of explorers that has long guarded the world's secrets and treasures. Cy and Tigs are not well liked since losing the Dragon's Tooth to the nefarious Dr. Phoenix. The tooth is the only object capable of killing the long-lived transmortals, and Phoenix has been tracking them down and murdering them.

The surviving transmortals, led by legendary warrior Gilgamesh of Uruk, descend on Ashtown in force, demanding justice. Cy and Tigs find themselves on the run in a desperate search to locate Phoenix and regain the Tooth. In the process, they uncover an evil even more dangerous than Phoenix, one that has been waiting for centuries to emerge.

EMPIRE OF BONES (ASHB#3)

By N.D. Wilson

ISBN: 9780375864414

Rating: 4.62 by 58 users

Description

Fans of both Percy Jackson and Indiana Jones will be captivated by the lost civilizations, ancient secrets, and buried treasure found in the third book of the Ashtown Burials series, an action-packed adventure by N. D. Wilson, the author of Leepike Ridge and the 100 Cupboards trilogy.

Cyrus and Antigone Smith have thwarted Dr. Phoenix's plans—for the moment. And they've uncovered a new threat from the transmortals and managed to escape with their lives. Their next adventure will take them deep into the caves below Ashtown, where they will look for help from those imprisoned in one of Ashtown's oldest tombs.

HURRY UP, HOUDINI (MTH#50)

By Mary Pope Osborne
Sal Murdocca

ISBN: 9780307980458

Rating: 4.04 by 7 users

Description

Magic Tree House #50 features Jack and Annie and legendary magician, Harry Houdini! If kids get hooked on Magic Tree House, they're hooked on reading! The Magic Tree House books, with their fiction and nonfiction books, are perfect for parents and teachers just starting to get into the "Core Curriculum." With a blend of magic, adventure, history, science, danger, and cuteness, the book topics range from kid pleasers (pirates, the Titanic, pandas) to curriculum perfect (rain forest, American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln) to seasonal shoe-ins (Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving). There is truly something for everyone here.

SKY JUMPERS (SJ#1)

By Peggy Eddleman

ISBN: 9780307981271

Rating: 4.29 by 106 users

Description

What happens when you can’t do the one thing that matters most?

12-year-old Hope lives in White Rock, a town struggling to recover from the green bombs of World War III. The bombs destroyed almost everything that came before, so the skill that matters most in White Rock—sometimes it feels like the only thing that matters—is the ability to invent so that the world can regain some of what it’s lost.

But Hope is terrible at inventing and would much rather sneak off to cliff dive into the Bomb’s Breath—the deadly band of air that covers the crater the town lives in—than fail at yet another invention.

When bandits discover that White Rock has invented priceless antibiotics, they invade. The town must choose whether to hand over the medicine and die from disease in the coming months or to die fighting the bandits now. Hope and her friends, Aaren and Brock, might be the only ones who can escape through the Bomb’s Breath and make the dangerous trek over the snow-covered mountain to get help.

For once, inventing isn’t the answer, but the daring and risk-taking that usually gets Hope into trouble might just save them all.

WILL IN SCARLET

By Matthew Cody

ISBN: 9780375868955

Rating: 3.73 by 113 users

Description

This reimagining of the Robin Hood legend tells the story of the young boy behind the bandit hero's rise to fame.

Will Shackley is the son of a lord, and though just thirteen, he’s led a charmed, protected life and is the heir to Shackley House, while his father is away on the Third Crusade with King Richard the Lionheart.

But with King Richard’s absence, the winds of treason are blowing across England, and soon Shackley House becomes caught up in a dangerous power struggle that drives Will out of the only home he’s ever known. Alone, he flees into the dangerous Sherwood Forest, where he joins an elusive gang of bandits readers will immediately recognize.

How Will helps a drunkard named Rob become one of the most feared and revered criminals in history is a swashbuckling ride perfect for anyone who loves heroes, villains, and adventure.

DAISY GETS LOST

By Chris Raschka

ISBN: 9780449817414

Rating: 3.85 by 113 users

Description

"A must for Daisy fans everywhere," declares School Library Journal in a starred review.

With the same emotional intensity that he brought to his New York Times bestselling, New York Times Best Illustrated, and Caldecott Medal-winning picture book A Ball for Daisy, Raschka has created a story that explores fear as only he can. Any child who has ever felt lost will relate to Daisy's despair upon finding herself in an unfamiliar part of the park after chasing a squirrel. In a nearly wordless picture book, Daisy encounters the unease of being lost and the joys of being found. Raschka's signature swirling, impressionistic illustrations and his affectionate story will particularly appeal to young dog lovers, teachers, parents and, of course, the legions of Daisy fans out there.

DOG LOVES COUNTING

By Louise Yates

ISBN: 9780449813423

Rating: 3.63 by 11 users

Description

Dog can't go to sleep. He loves books so much that he just can't stop reading. Dog tries counting sheep, but it's not working—perhaps there are some other creatures he can count? Soon Dog is off on an adventure, finding friends and numbers in unexpected places.

Meet Dog and let him show you why he LOVES COUNTING!

DOG-GONE SCHOOL

By Amy Schmidt
Ron Schmidt

ISBN: 9780375869747

Rating: 3.95 by 2 users

Description

This photographic book of school-themed poems is sure to delight dog lovers and poetry fans alike. As they did in the companion title, Loose Leashes, this husband-and-wife team combine his photographs with her poetry for a whimsical marriage of images and words.

PENGUIN CHA-CHA

By Kristi Valiant

ISBN: 9780375870729

Rating: 3.76 by 6 users

Description

Follow a determined girl named Julia as she tries to join in the fun of a mischevious group of dancing penguins. Set in The Rompin' Trompin' Park and Zoo, author/illustrator Kristi Valiant creates a vibrant, funny, and spirited picture book that will leave young readers shaking their very own tail feathers.

COWBOY BOYD AND MIGHTY CALLIO

By Lisa Moser
Sebastiaan Van Doninck

ISBN: 9780375870569

Rating: 2.90 by 38 users

Description

There's no other horse quite like Calliope. She's short. She's slow. She's lumpy. She's a rhinoceros. Still, Cowboy Boyd has a real strong belief in Calliope and her ability to help out the crew at the Double R Ranch. Boyd and Calliope try to prove themselves to the ranchers by rounding up strays and hauling posts, but it just doesn't look like it's going to work out. That is, until a storm drives all the cattle away from the ranch. They need someone real special to bring them back. . . .

Lisa Moser brings her trademark humor and strong structure to this smart and silly story of a cowboy and his beloved steed—a rhinoceros.

GIRL WHO WOULDN'T BRUSH HER HA

By Kate Bernheimer

ISBN: 9780375868788

Rating: 3.50 by 56 users

Description

Young fans of the Disney movie Tangled will especially love this hair-raising story. What happens when one little girl refuses to brush her long, beautiful hair? Well, one day a mouse comes to live in a particularly tangled lock. Soon after, more mice move in, and the girl's unruly mop is transformed into a marvelous mouse palace complete with secret passageways and a cheese cellar! She loves her new companions—they tell knock-knock jokes and are sweet to her doll, Baby—but as the girl comes to find out, living with more than a hundred mice atop your head isn't always easy. . . . Here's an fantastic tale that will have kids poring over the mice's elaborate world within the girl's wild, ever-changing hairdo.

SQUIRRELS ON SKIS

By J. Hamilton Ray

ISBN: 9780449810811

Rating: 3.72 by 5 users

Description

This new Beginner Book about manic skiing squirrels—by J. Hamilton Ray with illustrations by Pascal Lemaitre—has the feeling of an old classic read-aloud. "Nobody knew how the mania grew. First there was one, and then there were two. Three more came gliding from under the trees. LOOK! On the hill. Those are squirrels on skis! Below lay the town, snow-covered and still. Not a sound could be heard. All was silent, until . . . Swwwishhhh swooped the skiers, all dressed for play. Eighty-five squirrels and more on the way!" As you can imagine, the townsfolk are NOT amused. Can intrepid reporter Sally Sue Breeze find out where the squirrels are getting their skis-and make them stop skiing long enough to eat lunch-before pest-control guy Stanley Powers sucks them up in his vacuum device? (Don't worry—Sally triumphs in a most unexpected way.) With delightfully understated, funny illustrations by Pascal Lemaitre, this is the perfect book for beginning readers to curl up and chill out with on a snow day—or any day!

Originally created by Dr. Seuss, Beginner Books encourage children to read all by themselves, with simple words and illustrations that give clues to their meaning.

EYE OF MINDS, THE

By James Dashner

ISBN: 9780385741392

Rating: 3.74 by 670 users

Description

An all-new, edge-of-your seat adventure from James Dashner, the author of the New York Times bestselling Maze Runner series, The Eye of Minds is the first book in The Mortality Doctrine, a series set in a world of hyperadvanced technology, cyberterrorists, and gaming beyond your wildest dreams . . . and your worst nightmares.

Michael is a gamer. And like most gamers, he almost spends more time on the VirtNet than in the actual world. The VirtNet offers total mind and body immersion, and it’s addictive. Thanks to technology, anyone with enough money can experience fantasy worlds, risk their life without the chance of death, or just hang around with Virt-friends. And the more hacking skills you have, the more fun. Why bother following the rules when most of them are dumb, anyway?

But some rules were made for a reason. Some technology is too dangerous to fool with. And recent reports claim that one gamer is going beyond what any gamer has done before: he’s holding players hostage inside the VirtNet. The effects are horrific—the hostages have all been declared brain-dead. Yet the gamer’s motives are a mystery.

The government knows that to catch a hacker, you need a hacker.
And they’ve been watching Michael. They want him on their team.
But the risk is enormous. If he accepts their challenge, Michael will need to go off the VirtNet grid. There are back alleys and corners in the system human eyes have never seen and predators he can’t even fathom—and there’s the possibility that the line between game and reality will be blurred forever.

PINOCCHIO

By Carlo Collodi
Alice Carsey

ISBN: 9780307597069

Rating: 3.80 by 4 users

Description

The original, unabridged Pinocchio in a beautifully illustrated hardcover edition.

Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story is an astonishing work of fantasy, even richer and more wildly imaginative than the famous film that Disney made of it. The Everyman’s edition—the only one in hardcover—brings back the color-illustrated translation of 1916 that captures the vivid inventiveness of Collodi’s original. Here is the endearing wooden puppet, always dreaming of becoming a boy and always tumbling into trouble: kidnapped, robbed by a cat and a fox, turned into a donkey, escaping from an enormous smoking serpent and a green-skinned ogre, rescuing his father from the belly of a mile-long fish, haunted by the ghost of a talking cricket, watched over by a fairy with turquoise hair, and, time and again, betrayed by his lie-sensitive nose.

MR. PAINT PIG'S ABC'S

By Richard Scarry
Random House

ISBN: 9780449819029

Rating: 4.00 by 1 users

Description

When kids want to learn concepts, there's no better place to start than with a flap book.

And an alphabet extravaganza by Richard Scarry makes it a surefire winner.

With all of the fun, detail-oriented illustrations that have made Richard Scarry a global phenomenon, learning the ABC's is just a secondary benefit to the fun of the oversized flaps and silly doings as Mr. Paint Pig paints everything in sight.

ELMO'S LITTLE LIBRARY

By Sarah Albee
Constance Allen
Deborah November
Maggie Swanson
Tom Leigh

ISBN: 9780449817407

Rating: 0.00 by 0 users

Description

This little library of four bestselling Big Bird's Favorite Sesame Street board books starring Elmo includes: Elmo's Mother Goose, Elmo's Tricky Tongue Twisters, Elmo Says, and Elmo's ABC Book. Boys and girls ages 1–4 won't be able to resist either the stories or carrying them around in their sturdy little box complete with both a handle and Elmo on the front!

BLUE BOOK OF FAIRY TALES (BGB)

By Gordon Laite

ISBN: 9780385383639

Rating: 4.21 by 0 users

Description

Three fairy tale stories: Rupenzel, Beauty and the Beast, and Toads and Diamonds.

BLUE BOOK OF FAIRY TALES,THE

By Gordon Laite

ISBN: 9780449809969

Rating: 4.21 by 0 users

Description

Three fairy tale stories: Rupenzel, Beauty and the Beast, and Toads and Diamonds.

ODESSA AGAIN

By Dana Reinhardt

ISBN: 9780385739566

Rating: 3.52 by 16 users

Description

Fourth grader Odessa Green-Light lives with her mom and her toad of a little brother, Oliver. Her dad is getting remarried, which makes no sense according to Odessa. If the prefix "re" means "to do all over again," shouldn't he be remarrying Mom? Meanwhile, Odessa moves into the attic room of their new house. One day she gets mad and stomps across the attic floor. Then she feels as if she is falling and lands . . . on the attic floor. Turns out that Odessa has gone back in time a whole day! With this new power she can fix all sorts of things--embarrassing moments, big mistakes, and even help Oliver be less of a toad. Her biggest goal: reunite Mom and Dad.

YEAR OF LUMINOUS LOVE,THE

By Lurlene McDaniel

ISBN: 9780385741712

Rating: 4.00 by 116 users

Description

The rolling hills of Tennessee and the picturesque towns of Tuscany provide stunning backdrops for this sweeping contemporary saga, which introduces three devoted best friends facing the challenges of life after high school.

Ciana loves her family's land and the farm they've kept for generations, but it has fallen to her to keep the farm in working order. When she meets a handsome cowboy, she welcomes the diversion and finds herself believing in love at first sight. but their second meeting leaves her questioning her true feelings about everything.

Arie has battled health issues since her childhood, and now she is determined to regain her physical and mental strength. Working with a new horse seems like the perfect solution, but when she confides her deepest secret to a handsome and kindhearted horse trainer—a secret she hasn't revealed to her family or even her two best friends—there are surprising results.

Eden's boyfriend, Tony, is older and has money; he's also jealous and controlling. But she'd much rather stay with him than at home with her unreliable mother. Of course, he can't fill the role her best girlfriends do, and that makes him resentful. As Tony grows more demanding, Eden becomes scared. She must break free from this toxic relationship.

When Ciana finds a new direction for her life—one she'd never dreamed possible—she is able to offer Arie and Eden reprieve from their difficult situations. Together, the three embark on the experience of a lifetime.

WHAT THE WITCH LEFT (MFMB)

By Ruth Chew

ISBN: 9780449815717

Rating: 4.23 by 1 users

Description

"Ruth Chew's classic books perfectly capture the joy of everyday magic."—Mary Pope Osborne, bestselling author of the Magic Tree House series

Ruth Chew's chapter books are full of simple, matter-of-fact magic that's sure to enchant budding fantasy readers.

When Katy and Louise find the key to the locked drawer in Katy's bureau, they aren't impressed by old things belonging to Katy's Aunt Martha. There can't be anything special about the old robe, broken mirror, tin box, or red rubber boots inside, can there? But when Louise dons the robe during the school play and suddenly disappears, Katy and Louise realize that they might just be able to have some grand adventures with the things that Aunt Martha left behind.

ROAD TRIP

By Gary Paulsen
Gito Paulsen

ISBN: 9780385741910

Rating: 3.66 by 16 users

Description

Dad and Ben haven't been getting along recently and Dad hopes a road trip to rescue a border collie will help them reconnect. But Ben is on to Dad's plan and invites Ben's thuggish buddy, Theo. The family dog, Atticus, comes along too and the story is told by Ben and Atticus. When their truck breaks down, they commandeer an old school bus, along with its mechanic, Gus. Next, they pick up Mia, a waitress escaping a tense situation. Only sharp-eyed Atticus realizes that Theo is on the run—and someone is following them.

HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS

By Dr. Seuss

ISBN: 9780394800790

Rating: 4.34 by 2619 users

Description

It's Christmas, and Dr. Seuss has a classic holiday tale that will make for the perfect gift. Join cherished characters The Grinch, Max, Cindy Lou, and the residents of Who-ville for a comical and heartwarming story about the affects the Christmas spirit can have on even the smallest and coldest of hearts.

Now always available with a foil cover!

WAKING DARK, THE

By Robin Wasserman

ISBN: 9780375868771

Rating: 3.62 by 340 users

Description

They called it the killing day. Twelve people dead, all in the space of a few hours. Five murderers: neighbors, relatives, friends. All of them so normal. All of them seemingly harmless. All of them now dead by their own hand . . . except one. And that one has no answers to offer the shattered town. She doesn't even know why she killed—or whether she'll do it again.

Something is waking in the sleepy town of Oleander's, Kansas—something dark and hungry that lives in the flat earth and the open sky, in the vengeful hearts of upstanding citizens. As the town begins its descent into blood and madness, five survivors of the killing day are the only ones who can stop Oleander from destroying itself. Jule, the outsider at war with the world; West, the golden boy at war with himself; Daniel, desperate for a different life; Cass, who's not sure she deserves a life at all; and Ellie, who believes in sacrifice, fate, and in evil. Ellie, who always goes too far. They have nothing in common. They have nothing left to lose. And they have no way out. Which means they have no choice but to stand and fight, to face the darkness in their town—and in themselves.

CAT IN THE HAT (SPANISH)

By Dr. Seuss
Carlos Rivera

ISBN: 9780394816265

Rating: 4.12 by 25 users

Description

None

SOPHIE'S SQUASH

By Pat Zietlow Miller
Anne Wilsdorf

ISBN: 9780307978967

Rating: 4.33 by 266 users

Description

On a trip to the farmers' market with her parents, Sophie chooses a squash, but instead of letting her mom cook it, she names it Bernice. From then on, Sophie brings Bernice everywhere, despite her parents' gentle warnings that Bernice will begin to rot. As winter nears, Sophie does start to notice changes.... What's a girl to do when the squash she loves is in trouble?

TEARDROP (TDT #1)

By Lauren Kate

ISBN: 9780385742658

Rating: 3.69 by 15 users

Description

Never, ever cry...

Seventeen-year-old Eureka won't let anyone close enough to feel her pain. After her mother was killed in a freak accident, the things she used to love hold no meaning. She wants to escape, but one thing holds her back: Ander, the boy who is everywhere she goes, whose turquoise eyes are like the ocean.

And then Eureka uncovers an ancient tale of romance and heartbreak, about a girl who cried an entire continent into the sea. Suddenly her mother's death and Ander's appearance seem connected, and her life takes on dark undercurrents that don't make sense.

Can everything you love be washed away?

UNTOLD (LL#2)

By Sarah Rees Brennan

ISBN: 9780375870422

Rating: 4.06 by 90 users

Description

Free from bonds, but not each other

It’s time to choose sides… On the surface, Sorry-in-the-Vale is a sleepy English town. But Kami Glass knows the truth. Sorry-in-the-Vale is full of magic. In the old days, the Lynburn family ruled with fear, terrifying the people into submission in order to kill for blood and power. Now the Lynburns are back, and Rob Lynburn is gathering sorcerers so that the town can return to the old ways.

But Rob and his followers aren’t the only sorcerers in town. A decision must be made: pay the blood sacrifice, or fight. For Kami, this means more than just choosing between good and evil. With her link to Jared Lynburn severed, she’s now free to love anyone she chooses. But who should that be?’

BARBIE 9 FAVORITE FAIRY TALES

By Various
Golden Books

ISBN: 9780449818619

Rating: 3.00 by 1 users

Description

Girls ages 3–7 will love this all-new Barbie Little Golden Books Collection featuring nine bestselling Barbie DVD titles: Barbie™ in The Pink Shoes, Barbie™ in The Princess and the Popstar, Barbie™ in A Mermaid Tale, Barbie™ in A Mermaid Tale 2, Barbie™ Princess Charm School, Barbie™ A Fairy Secret, Barbie™ A Fashion Fairytale, Barbie™ and the Three Musketeers, and Barbie™ and The Diamond Castle.

BIKINI BOTTOM BUDDIES

By Random House

ISBN: 9780449817643

Rating: 0.00 by 0 users

Description

Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants and his best friends Patrick, Squidward, and Sandy are ready to play! Boys and girls ages 0–3 will love this sturdy box of four board books that includes a handle for silliness on the go!

COLORS EVERYWHERE! - BOARD BK

By Mary Tillworth

ISBN: 9780449817827

Rating: 3.00 by 2 users

Description

Boys and girls ages 1–4 will love learning about colors in this sturdy Bubble Guppies board book.

DC SUPER FRIENDS LGB FAVORITES

By Various
Golden Books

ISBN: 9780449816219

Rating: 5.00 by 1 users

Description

Boys ages 2–5 will love this DC Super Friends Little Golden Book Favorites which collects three exciting DC Super Friends Stories in one value-packed hardcover book. This collection includes Big Heroes!, Batman!, and Superman!

MARIPOSA & THE FAIRY PRIN-BGB

By Kristen L. Depken

ISBN: 9780449816264

Rating: 0.00 by 0 users

Description

Girls ages 3–7 will love this beautiful hardcover Big Golden Book based on the latest Barbie movie releasing in fall 2013 on DVD and Blu-ray.

MONSTER TIME - NIFTY LIFT-AND-

By Andrea Posner-Sanchez
Scott Tilley
Ken Becker

ISBN: 9780736430609

Rating: 3.00 by 1 users

Description

Mike Wazowski, Sulley, Boo, and the rest of the characters from Disney/Pixar's blockbuster hit Monsters, Inc. are featured in this great lift-the-flap book. Boys and girls ages 2–5 will love lifting over 30 sturdy flaps and discovering what goes on in Monstropolis.

MONSTERS GET SCARED OF THE DAR

By Melissa Lagonegro
Walt Disney Company

ISBN: 9780736430562

Rating: 4.40 by 4 users

Description

Join Mike and Sulley, stars of Disney/Pixar Monsters, Inc. and Disney/Pixar Monsters University, as they help a little monster conquer his fear of the dark in this Glow-in-the-Dark Pictureback with stickers that glow! Boys and girls ages 3–7 won't be afraid of the dark after reading this delightful tale!

MONSTERS IN A BOX - FRDSHP BOX

By Andrea Posner-Sanchez
Walt Disney Company

ISBN: 9780736429894

Rating: 5.00 by 1 users

Description

Just in time for the DVD and Blu-ray release of Disney/Pixar Monsters University, this sturdy boxed set of four monstrously-fun board books stars Mike, Sulley, and their college pals. Boys and girls ages 1–4 will love carrying the books with them wherever they go using the convenient handle!

PINK BOOTS AND PONYTAILS - 8X8

By Mary Man-Kong

ISBN: 9780449816370

Rating: 0.00 by 0 users

Description

Girls ages 3–7 will love this full-color storybook based on the latest Barbie Sisters movie, releasing in fall 2013 on DVD and Blu-ray.

POCOYO AND FRIENDS - FRNSHP BX

By Kristen L. Depken

ISBN: 9780449813416

Rating: 0.00 by 0 users

Description

Pocoyo and his friends Pato, Elly, and Loula have many adventures together. Now children ages 1–4 can join in on the fun with this boxed set featuring four board books and a sturdy handle—perfect for reading at home or on the go!

SHAPES, COLORS, COUNTING & MOR

By Frank Berrios
Walt Disney Company

ISBN: 9780736431057

Rating: 4.50 by 2 users

Description

Boys ages 1–4 who love Disney/Pixar's Cars will race into learning about colors, numbers, shapes, and opposites with Lightning McQueen, Mater, and all their friends! This sturdy boxed set includes four colorful board books that each feature a different early learning concept. Plus, there's a plastic handle for learning fun on the go!

THOMAS' BIG BOOK OF BEGINNER B

By Wilbert Awdry

ISBN: 9780449816431

Rating: 5.00 by 2 users

Description

Thomas' Big Book of Beginner Books offers the following Thomas & Friends backlist favorites: Stop, Train, Stop!; A Crack in the Track; Go, Train, Go!; Blue Train, Green Train; Trains, Cranes & Troublesome Trucks; and Fast Train, Slow Train. The texts are tailored to beginning readers and will delight boys ages 3–6, whether they read them solo or listen to them read aloud.

WORLD'S GREATEST RACERS

By Walt Disney Company

ISBN: 9780736431453

Rating: 5.00 by 1 users

Description

Lightning McQueen hits the track in this exciting and interactive book! Each tab features an international racer, so boys ages 2–5 can lift the flaps to learn more about their fast friends from Disney/Pixar's Cars!

MISTER MAX: THE BOOK OF LOST

By Cynthia Voigt
Iacopo Bruno

ISBN: 9780307976819

Rating: 3.64 by 276 users

Description

Max Starling's theatrical father likes to say that at twelve a boy is independent. He also likes to boast (about his acting skills, his wife's acting skills, a fortune only his family knows is metaphorical), but more than anything he likes to have adventures. Max Starling's equally theatrical mother is not a boaster but she enjoys a good adventure as much as her husband. When these two disappear, what can sort-of-theatrical Max and his not-at-all theatrical grandmother do? They have to wait to find out something, anything, and to worry, and, in Max's case, to figure out how to earn a living at the same time as he maintains his independence. This is the first of three books, all featuring the mysterious Mister Max.

INDIGO

By Gina Linko

ISBN: 9780449812839

Rating: 3.53 by 18 users

Description

A gift?

A curse?

A moment that changes everything. . . .

Caught in an unexpected spring squall, Corrine's first instinct is to protect her little sister Sophie after a nasty fall. But when Corrine reaches out to comfort her sister, the exact opposite occurs. Her touch--charged with an otherworldly force and bursting with blinding indigo color--surges violently from Corrine to her sister. In an instant, Sophie is dead. From that moment on, Corrine convinces herself that everyone would be better off if she simply withdrew from life.

When her family abruptly moves to New Orleans, Corrine's withdrawal is made all the easier. No friends. No connections. No chance of hurting anyone. But strange things continue to happen around her in this haunting, mystical city. And she realizes that her power cannot be ignored, especially when Rennick, a talented local artist with a bad-boy past, suggests another possibility: Corrine might have the touch. An ability to heal those around her. But knowing what happened to her sister, can Corrine trust her gift?

NO SUCH THING AS A WITCH(MFMB)

By Ruth Chew

ISBN: 9780449815595

Rating: 4.08 by 5 users

Description

"Ruth Chew's classic books perfectly capture the joy of everyday magic."—Mary Pope Osborne, bestselling author of the Magic Tree House series

Ruth Chew's chapter books are full of simple, matter-of-fact magic that's sure to enchant budding fantasy readers.

Nora Cooper and her brother Tad don't know what to make of their new neighbor Maggie Brown. She loves animals and has lots of them—a cat, a parakeet, a dog, and a large black lizard. The other cats and birds in the neighborhood seem to like Maggie as well. And Maggie makes the most delicious fudge. In fact, her fudge is so good, after one piece it almost seems as if Tad and Nora's father are becoming animal lovers . . . and after several pieces, Nora can even have a conversation with the family dog, Skipper. But what happens when you eat one piece too many?

TANDEM: MANY WORLDS BK 1

By Anna Jarzab

ISBN: 9780385742771

Rating: 3.80 by 8 users

Description

Everything repeats.
You. Your best friend. Every person you know.
Many worlds, many lives--infinite possibilities.
Welcome to the multiverse.

Sixteen-year-old Sasha Lawson has only ever known one small, ordinary life. When she was young, she loved her grandfather's stories of parallel worlds, inhabited by girls who looked like her but led totally different lives. Sasha never believed such worlds were real—until now, when she finds herself thrust into one against her will.

o prevent imminent war, Sasha must slip into the life of an alternate version of herself, a princess who has vanished on the eve of her arranged marriage. If Sasha succeeds in fooling everyone, she will be returned home; if she fails, she'll be trapped in another girl's life forever. As time runs out, Sasha finds herself torn between two worlds, two lives, and two young men vying for her love—one who knows her secret, and one who believes she's someone she's not.

FROSTY THE SNOWMAN - BGBB

By Diane Muldrow
Golden Books

ISBN: 9780385378703

Rating: 4.33 by 0 users

Description

Everyone's favorite snowman with a magic hat, a button nose, and eyes made out of coal comes to life on Christmas every year. Based on the beloved 1969 television special, this Big Golden Board Book retells the whole magical story of Frosty the Snowman for boys and girls 2–5!

MIDNIGHT DRESS, THE

By Karen Foxlee

ISBN: 9780375856457

Rating: 4.17 by 103 users

Description

Quiet misfit Rose doesn't expect to fall in love with the sleepy beach town of Leonora. Nor does she expect to become fast friends with beautiful, vivacious Pearl Kelly, organizer of the high school float at the annual Harvest Festival parade. It's better not to get too attached when Rose and her father live on the road, driving their caravan from one place to the next whenever her dad gets itchy feet. But Rose can't resist the mysterious charms of the town or the popular girl, try as she might.

Pearl convinces Rose to visit Edie Baker, once a renowned dressmaker, now a rumored witch. Together Rose and Edie hand-stitch an unforgettable dress of midnight blue for Rose to wear at the Harvest Festival—a dress that will have long-lasting consequences on life in Leonora, a dress that will seal the fate of one of the girls. Karen Foxlee's breathtaking novel weaves friendship, magic, and a murder mystery into something moving, real, and distinctly original.

RED

By Alison Cherry

ISBN: 9780385742931

Rating: 3.87 by 229 users

Description

Felicity St. John has it all—loyal best friends, a hot guy, and artistic talent. And she’s right on track to win the Miss Scarlet pageant. Her perfect life is possible because of just one thing: her long, wavy, coppery red hair.

Having red hair is all that matters in Scarletville. Redheads hold all the power—and everybody knows it. That’s why Felicity is scared down to her roots when she receives an anonymous note:

I know your secret.

Because Felicity is a big fake. Her hair color comes straight out of a bottle. And if anyone discovered the truth, she’d be a social outcast faster than she could say "strawberry blond." Her mother would disown her, her friends would shun her, and her boyfriend would dump her. And forget about winning that pageant crown and the prize money that comes with it—money that would allow her to fulfill her dream of going to art school.

Felicity isn’t about to let someone blackmail her life away. But just how far is she willing to go to protect her red cred?

GATED

By Amy Christine Parker

ISBN: 9780449815977

Rating: 3.74 by 757 users

Description

A fast-paced, nerve-fraying contemporary thriller that questions loyalties and twists truths.

Appearances can be deceiving.

In the Community, life seems perfect. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Pioneer invited Lyla’s family to join his group and escape the evil in the world. They were happy to be chosen, happy to move away from New York and start over in such an idyllic gated community. Now seventeen, Lyla knows that Pioneer is more than just their charismatic leader, he is their prophet . . . but his visions have grown dark.

Lyla is a loyal member of the Community, but a chance encounter with an outsider boy has her questioning Pioneer, the Community—everything. And if there’s one thing not allowed in the Community, it’s doubt. Her family and friends are certain in their belief. Lyla wishes she could feel the same. As Pioneer begins to manipulate his flock toward disaster, the question remains: Will Lyla follow them over the edge?

From the outside looking in, it’s hard to understand why anyone would join a cult. But Gated tells the story of the Community from the inside looking out, and from behind the gates things are not quite so simple. Amy Christine Parker’s beautiful writing creates a chilling, utterly unique YA story. Perfect for fans of creepy thrillers and contemporary fiction alike.

HELLO, MY BABY (CITHK)

By Tish Rabe
Joe Mathieu
Aristides Ruiz

ISBN: 9780449814345

Rating: 4.00 by 1 users

Description

The Cat in the Hat travels the world to learn about baby animals in this simple, sturdy board book with 30 fact-filled flaps! From the Galapagos Islands to the Australian Outback, the forests of India to the islands of Hawaii and Madagascar, the Cat visits with babies of all shapes and sizes, among them land iguanas, lava lizards, kookabura, koalas, kangaroos, flying foxes, giant squirrels, ring-tailed lemur, hermit crabs, humpback whales, hissing cockroaches (yikes!), and many more. Including animals and habitats featured on the hit PBS Kids TV show The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!, this is the perfect way to introduce the youngest Cat fans to the joys of reading about the natural world.

BIG GOLDEN BOOK OF DINOSAURS

By Robert T Bakker

ISBN: 9780375859588

Rating: 3.00 by 1 users

Description

Renowned paleontologist Robert T. Bakker and award-winning paleoartist Luis V. Rey combine forces in this oversized picture book about the evolution of dinosaurs. From the conquest of land by dino ancestor Acanthostega during the Devonian Period, through the mass die-off of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period, Bakker and Rey take readers on a safari through time while paying subtle homage to the 1960 Giant Golden Book Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles that inspired them both as young dinophiles. With stops along the way to look at monster bugs, ferocious fin-backs, fluffy dinosaurs, sea monsters and the 12-year-old girl who discovered them, dinosaur orchestras, tickling tyrannosaurs, and much, much more, this is a journey readers will never forget. It's a perfect gift for young dinosaur lovers—as well as adult fans of Dr. Bakker and Luis Rey!

ROBOTS, ROBOTS EVERYWHERE!

By Sue Fliess
Bob Staake

ISBN: 9780449810798

Rating: 4.08 by 12 users

Description

On the ground and in the air,/Robots, robots everywhere!

Up in space, beneath the seas,/Robots make discoveries . . .

So begins this rollicking Little Golden Book featuring robots of all kinds, from ones up in space to the ones we use at home. With bold, colorful artwork by award-winner Bob Staake, it's a perfect introduction to the fascinating subject of today's real robots!

KICK START KINDERGARTEN

By Sylvan Learning

ISBN: 9780307946133

Rating: 0.00 by 0 users

Description

This comprehensive kindergarten success bundle includes books, flashcards, access to online activities, and more. It contains three Fun on the Run activity books to help kids get comfortable with the alphabet, numbers and beginning words, 230 spelling flashcards, 230 math flashcards, and exclusive free access to extra learning online.

CAT/HAT DICTIONARY IN SPANISH

By P.D. Eastman
Dr. Seuss
Robert Nardelli

ISBN: 9780394815428

Rating: 4.35 by 23 users

Description

A perfect introductin to reading Spanish! Simple English words and sentences are introduced by pictures. Then the words and sentences are translated into Spanish with the translation of the featured word in capital letters. It's that easy. And for the child who wants to go further—a two-page, basic key to the pronunciation of the language. Great for introducing Spanish to English-speaking children and for introducing English to Spanish-speaking children!

HAT BOX

By Stephen Sondheim

ISBN: 9780307957726

Rating: 4.75 by 4 users

Description

None

SW: MAKING OF STAR WARS

By J.W. Rinzler

ISBN: 9780345477613

Rating: 4.48 by 43 users

Description

More than thirty years ago, filmmaker George Lucas realized a longtime dream, creating a swashbuckling sf saga inspired by vintage Flash Gordon serials, classic American westerns, the epic cinema of Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa, and mythological heroes. Its original title: The Star Wars. The rest is history–and how it was made is a story as entertaining and exciting as the movie that has enthralled millions for the past three decades.

Using his unprecedented access to the Lucasfilm Archives and its trove of never-before-published “lost” interviews, photos, production notes, factoids, and anecdotes, Star Wars scholar J. W. Rinzler hurtles readers back in time for an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the nearly decade-long quest of George Lucas and his key collaborators to make the “little” movie that became a phenomenon. For the first time, it’s all here:

• the evolution of the now-classic story and characters–including “Annikin Starkiller” and “a huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills” named Han Solo
• excerpts from George Lucas’s numerous, ever-morphing script drafts
• the birth of Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects company that revolutionized Hollywood filmmaking
• the grueling, nearly catastrophic location shoot in Tunisia and the following breakneck dash at Elstree Studios in London
• the intensive auditions that won the cast members their roles–and made them legends
• the who’s who of young 1970s film rebels who pitched in to help–including Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Brian DePalma

But perhaps most exciting, and rarest of all, are the first interviews conducted before and during production and immediately after the release of Star Wars–in which George Lucas, the film’s stars, composer John Williams, effects masters Dennis Muren, Richard Edlund, and John Dykstra, Phil Tippett, Rick Baker, legendary production designer John Barry, and a host of others share their fascinating tales from the trenches and candid opinions of the movie that would ultimately change their lives.

No matter where you stand in the spectrum of this thirty-year phenomenon, The Making of Star Wars stands as a crucial document–rich in fascination and revelation–of a genuine cinematic and cultural touchstone.

COUNSELOR, THE (MTI)

By Cormac McCarthy

ISBN: 9780345803597

Rating: 3.65 by 38 users

Description

On the eve of becoming a married man, the Counselor makes a risky entree into the drug trade--and gambles that the consequences won't catch up to him.
Along the gritty terrain of the Texas-Mexico border, a respected and recently engaged lawyer throws his stakes into a cocaine trade worth millions. His hope is that it will be a one-time deal and that, afterward, he can settle into life with his beloved fiancee. But instead, the Counselor finds himself mired in a brutal and dangerous game--one that threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves. Deft, shocking, and unforgettable, McCarthy is at his finest in this gripping tale about risk, consequence, and the treacherous balance between the two.

BIG NEW YORKER BOOK OF CATS

By The New Yorker Magazine
Haruki Murakami
Calvin Trillin
M.F.K. Fisher
Roald Dahl

ISBN: 9780679644774

Rating: 3.75 by 8 users

Description

Look what The New Yorker dragged in! It’s the purr-fect gathering of talent celebrating our feline companions. This bountiful collection, beautifully illustrated in full color, features articles, fiction, humor, poems, cartoons, cover art, drafts, and drawings from the magazine’s archives. Among the contributors are Margaret Atwood, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Roald Dahl, Wolcott Gibbs, Robert Graves, Emily Hahn, Ted Hughes, Jamaica Kincaid, Steven Millhauser, Haruki Murakami, Amy Ozols, Robert Pinsky, Jean Rhys, James Thurber, John Updike, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and E. B. White. Including a Foreword by Anthony Lane, this gorgeous keepsake will be a treasured gift for all cat lovers.

Advance praise for The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

“Covers, cartoons, authors of pieces both longer and shorter, reflect current views of the feline subject in all its glory. . . . The quality, humor and variety make for another successful New Yorker collection.”—Kirkus Reviews

“An eminently giftable anthology.”—Publishers Weekly

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ AT WORK

By Annie Leibovitz

ISBN: 9780375505102

Rating: 4.07 by 1841 users

Description

“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it."
—Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz describes how her pictures were made, starting with Richard Nixon's resignation, a story she covered with Hunter S. Thompson, and ending with Barack Obama's campaign. In between are a Rolling Stones Tour, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, The Blues Brothers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keith Haring, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patti Smith, George W. Bush, William S. Burroughs, Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. The most celebrated photographer of our time discusses portraiture, reportage, fashion photography, lighting, and digital cameras.

VOGUE WEDDINGS

By Hamish Bowles
Vera Wang

ISBN: 9780307957061

Rating: 3.43 by 7 users

Description

A spectacular book of nearly 400 photographs of the weddings and wedding dresses of royalty, social figures, models, artists, actors, musicians and designers which have appeared in Vogue through the magazine’s 120 year history. Here are ethereal brides photographed by Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, Baron de Meyer, Patrick Lichfield, Edward Steichen, Robert Doisneau, Tim Walker, François Halard, Patrick Demarchelier, Jonathan Becker, Norma Jean Roy, Mario Testino, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, Irving Penn, Arthur Elgort, Steven Meisel, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber and Craig McDean among others. These photographers have captured brides across America and abroad, posed for formal portraits, or captured in the excitement of moment of their wedding day.

These images transport you to a myriad of romantic settings around the world, from grand social and royal weddings in storied castles, palaces, and cathedrals, to weddings by the sea or in the countryside. In the Introduction, Hamish Bowles brings his historian’s eye to reveal fascinating behind-the-scenes details as he looks at the glamour of weddings past and present; while Mario Testino, Plum Sykes, Marina Rust and Sarah Mower tell us personal stories about their own weddings or memorable ones they attended.

Here are the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in London; Charlene Wittstock and Prince Albert in Monaco; Carolina Herrera Jr., and Miguel Báez Spinola in Spain; Jemma Kidd and Arthur Wellesley, the Earl of Mornington, in Barbados; Sofia Coppola and Thomas Mars in Italy; Kate Moss and Jamie Hince in the Cotswolds; Lauren Bush and David Lauren at the RRL Ranch in Colorado; Marina Rust and Ian Connor in Maine; Lauren Davis and Andrés Santo Domingo in Cartagena, Colombia as well as such iconic photos as Bianca and Mick Jagger in the car after their wedding in St. Tropez. A chapter on models’ weddings includes portraits of Natalia Vodianova, Coco Rocha, Maggie Rizer, Stella Tennant, Lara Stone and Cindy Crawford among others in their own wedding dress choices. Most imaginative are the fashion portfolios created by the magazine’s editors of bridal photo shoots, many including couture, in The Vogue Wedding chapter. Meanwhile The Wedding Guide offers ten designers celebrated for their stylish and romantic designs, from Vera Wang to J. Crew.

Vogue Weddings: Brides, Dresses, Designers is a book that is not only informative, and rich with historical detail, but presents a dramatic collection of iconic, inspirational images.

FUTURE, THE (UAB)(CD)

By Al Gore

ISBN: 9780449015469

Rating: 3.75 by 8 users

Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come.

Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:

• Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.
• The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
• The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.
• A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
• Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
• There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.

From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right.

Praise for The Future

“Magisterial . . . The passion is unmistakable. So is the knowledge. Practically every page offers an illumination.”—Bloomberg

“In The Future . . . Gore takes on a subject whose scale matches that of his achievements and ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Historically grounded . . . Gore’s strengths lie in his passion for the subject and in his ability to take the long view by putting current events and trends in historical context.”—Publishers Weekly

“Provocative, smart, densely argued . . . a tour de force of Big Picture thinking.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A luminously intelligent analysis that is packed with arresting ideas and facts.”—The Guardian

DAYS OF FIRE

By Peter Baker

ISBN: 9780385525183

Rating: 4.14 by 33 users

Description

In Days of Fire, Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times, takes us on a gripping and intimate journey through the eight years of the Bush and Cheney administration in a tour-de-force narrative of a dramatic and controversial presidency.

Theirs was the most captivating American political partnership since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger: a bold and untested president and his seasoned, relentless vice president. Confronted by one crisis after another, they struggled to protect the country, remake the world, and define their own relationship along the way. In Days of Fire, Peter Baker chronicles the history of the most consequential presidency in modern times through the prism of its two most compelling characters, capturing the elusive and shifting alliance of George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney as no historian has done before. He brings to life with in-the-room immediacy all the drama of an era marked by devastating terror attacks, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and financial collapse.
The real story of Bush and Cheney is a far more fascinating tale than the familiar suspicion that Cheney was the power behind the throne. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with key players, and thousands of pages of never-released notes, memos, and other internal documents, Baker paints a riveting portrait of a partnership that evolved dramatically over time, from the early days when Bush leaned on Cheney, making him the most influential vice president in history, to their final hours, when the two had grown so far apart they were clashing in the West Wing. Together and separately, they were tested as no other president and vice president have been, first on a bright September morning, an unforgettable “day of fire” just months into the presidency, and on countless days of fire over the course of eight tumultuous years.
Days of Fire is a monumental and definitive work that will rank with the best of presidential histories. As absorbing as a thriller, it is eye-opening and essential reading.

QUIET

By Susan Cain

ISBN: 9780307352156

Rating: 4.03 by 618 users

Description

The book that started the Quiet Revolution

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.

Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content

GOD'S BUCKET LIST

By Teresa Tomeo

ISBN: 9780385346900

Rating: 4.60 by 10 users

Description

From the popular EWTN TV and radio personality comes a to-do list that's just divine.

Scripture tells us only God knows the desires of our hearts. It was, after all, God who placed them there because they are designed to lead us to His will for our lives. Why, then, is it so challenging at times to figure out if we are on the right track when it comes to what we believe we want or need? God's Bucket List will examine what God wants for each of us: mercy, fruitfulness, fellowship, and peace, just to name a few, and will explain what the Christian faith teaches about these gifts and how we can begin to achieve and cross out, one by one, the items on that heavenly list.

JESUS AND THE JEWISH ROOTS OF

By Brant Pitre
Scott Hahn

ISBN: 9780385531849

Rating: 4.48 by 221 users

Description

In recent years, Christians everywhere are rediscovering the Jewish roots of their faith. Every year at Easter time, many believers now celebrate Passover meals (known as Seders) seeking to understand exactly what happened at Jesus’ final Passover, the night before he was crucified.

Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist shines fresh light on the Last Supper by looking at it through Jewish eyes. Using his in-depth knowledge of the Bible and ancient Judaism, Dr. Brant Pitre answers questions such as: What was the Passover like at the time of Jesus? What were the Jewish hopes for the Messiah? What was Jesus’ purpose in instituting the Eucharist during the feast of Passover? And, most important of all, what did Jesus mean when he said, “This is my body… This is my blood”?

To answer these questions, Pitre explores ancient Jewish beliefs about the Passover of the Messiah, the miraculous Manna from heaven, and the mysterious Bread of the Presence. As he shows, these three keys—the Passover, the Manna, and the Bread of the Presence—have the power to unlock the original meaning of the Eucharistic words of Jesus. Along the way, Pitre also explains how Jesus united the Last Supper to his death on Good Friday and his Resurrection on Easter Sunday.

Inspiring and informative, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist is a groundbreaking work that is sure to illuminate one of the greatest mysteries of the Christian faith: the mystery of Jesus’ presence in “the breaking of the bread.”

ON HEAVEN AND EARTH

By Jorge Mario Bergoglio
Abraham Skorka

ISBN: 9780770435066

Rating: 4.04 by 114 users

Description

New York Times Bestseller!

From the man who became Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio shares his thoughts on religion, reason, and the challenges the world faces in the 21st century with Abraham Skorka, a rabbi and biophysicist.

For years Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Argentina, and Rabbi Abraham Skorka were tenacious promoters of interreligious dialogues on faith and reason. They both sought to build bridges among Catholicism, Judaism, and the world at large. On Heaven and Earth, originally published in Argentina in 2010, brings together a series of these conversations where both men talked about various theological and worldly issues, including God, fundamentalism, atheism, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and globalization. From these personal and accessible talks comes a first-hand view of the man who would become pope to 1.2 billion Catholics around the world in March 2013.

ZEALOT

By Reza Aslan

ISBN: 9781400069224

Rating: 3.81 by 6960 users

Description

From the bestselling author of No God but God comes a provocative & well-researched biography challenging long-held assumptions about Jesus.
2000 years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher & miracle worker walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish the Kingdom of God. The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was executed as a state criminal. Within decades of his shameful death, followers would call him God.
Sifting thru centuries of mythmaking, Aslan sheds light on one of history’s most influential & enigmatic characters by examining Jesus thru the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: 1st-century Palestine, an age of apocalyptic fervor. Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers & would-be messiahs wandered thru the Holy Land, bearing divine messages. This was the age of zealotry—a nationalism that made resistance to Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. Few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both imperial authorities & their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy. Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against historical sources, Aslan describes a man of passionate conviction, yet rife with contradiction; a man of peace who exhorted followers to arm themselves with swords; an exorcist & faith healer who urged disciples to keep his identity a secret; & ultimately the seditious “King of the Jews” whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his lifetime. Aslan explores the reasons why the early Church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. He grapples with how Jesus understood himself, the mystery at the heart of subsequent claims about his divinity.
Zealot yields a fresh perspective on one of the greatest stories ever told even as it affirms the radically transformative nature of Jesus’ life & mission. The result is an elegant biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a portrait of a man, a time & the birth of a religion.
“Riveting...Aslan synthesizes Scripture & scholarship to create an original account.”—The New Yorker
“Aslan’s insistence on human & historical actuality turns out to be far more interesting than dogmatic theology...This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, & honors him in the process.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Aslan brings a fine popular style, shorn of all jargon, to bear on the presentation of Jesus of Nazareth...He isn’t interested in attacking religion or even the church, much less in comparing Christianity unfavorably to another religion...You don’t have to lose your religion to learn much that’s vitally germane to its history from Aslan’s absorbing, reader-friendly book.”—Booklist
“Aslan is steeped in the history, languages & scriptural foundation of the biblical scholar & is a very clear writer with an authoritative, but not pedantic, voice. Those of us who wade into this genre often know how rare that is.”—Seattle Times

CATOLICISMO

By Robert Barron

ISBN: 9780385346726

Rating: 0.00 by 0 users

Description

¿QUÉ ES EL CATOLICISMO?

¿Una tradición viva de dos mil años? ¿Una visión del
mundo? ¿Una forma de vida? ¿Una relación? ¿Un misterio? En
Catolicismo, el padre Robert Barron examina todas estas preguntas y más,
intentando captar el cuerpo, el corazón y la mente de la fe católica.
Comenzando desde el cimiento esencial de la encarnación, vida y enseñanza
de Jesucristo, el padre Barron se mueve a través de los elementos definitorios
del catolicismo — desde los sacramentos, la devoción y la oración, hasta María,
los apóstoles y santos, a la gracia, la salvación, el cielo y el infierno— usando
su entendimiento dinámico y distintivo del arte, la literatura, la arquitectura,
los relatos personales, las escrituras, la teología, la filosofía y la historia para
presentar la Iglesia al mundo.

De la mano de su serie documental con el mismo título, Catolicismo es
un viaje íntimo que captura “lo católico” en toda su profundidad y belleza.
Ecléctico, único e inspirador, el padre Barron le devuelve la vida a la fe para
una nueva generación, con un estilo fiel a verdades atemporales, pero que a la
vez habla en la lengua de la vida contemporánea.

JEWISH WOMAN'S PRAYER BOOK, A

By Aliza Lavie

ISBN: 9780385522748

Rating: 4.19 by 21 users

Description

A beautiful and moving one-of-a-kind collection that draws from a variety of Jewish traditions, through the ages, to commemorate every occasion and every passage in the cycle of life, including:

Special prayers for the Sabbath, holidays, and important dates of the Jewish year
Prayers to mark celebratory milestones, such as bat mitzva, marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth
Prayers for companionship, love, and fertility
Prayers for healing, strength, and personal growth
Prayers for daily reflection and thanksgiving
Prayers for comfort and understanding in times of tragedy and loss

On the eve of Yom Kippur in 2002, Aliza Lavie, a university professor, read an interview with an Israeli woman who had lost both her mother and her baby daughter in a terrorist attack. As Lavie stood in the synagogue later that evening, she searched for comfort for the bereaved woman, for a reminder that she was not alone but part of a great tradition of Jewish women who have responded to unbearable loss with strength and fortitude. Unable to find sufficient solace within the traditional prayer book and inspired by the memory of her own grandmother’s steadfast knowledge and faith, Lavie began researching and compiling prayers written for and by Jewish women.

A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book is the result—a beautiful and moving one-of-a-kind collection that draws from a variety of Jewish traditions, through the ages, to commemorate every occasion and every passage in the cycle of life, from the mundane to the extraordinary. This elegant, inspiring volume includes special prayers for the Sabbath and holidays and important dates of the Jewish year; prayers to mark celebratory milestones, such as bat mitzva, marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth; and prayers for comfort and understanding in times of tragedy and loss. Each prayer is presented in Hebrew and in an English translation, along with fascinating commentary on its origins and allusions. Culled from a wide range of sources, both geographically and historically, this collection testifies that women's prayers were—and continue to be—an inspired expression of personal supplication and desire.

MY BRIEF HISTORY

By Stephen Hawking

ISBN: 9780345535283

Rating: 3.48 by 227 users

Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Stephen Hawking has dazzled readers worldwide with a string of bestsellers exploring the mysteries of the universe. Now, for the first time, perhaps the most brilliant cosmologist of our age turns his gaze inward for a revealing look at his own life and intellectual evolution.

My Brief History recounts Stephen Hawking’s improbable journey, from his postwar London boyhood to his years of international acclaim and celebrity. Lavishly illustrated with rarely seen photographs, this concise, witty, and candid account introduces readers to a Hawking rarely glimpsed in previous books: the inquisitive schoolboy whose classmates nicknamed him Einstein; the jokester who once placed a bet with a colleague over the existence of a particular black hole; and the young husband and father struggling to gain a foothold in the world of physics and cosmology.

Writing with characteristic humility and humor, Hawking opens up about the challenges that confronted him following his diagnosis of ALS at age twenty-one. Tracing his development as a thinker, he explains how the prospect of an early death urged him onward through numerous intellectual breakthroughs, and talks about the genesis of his masterpiece A Brief History of Time—one of the iconic books of the twentieth century.

Clear-eyed, intimate, and wise, My Brief History opens a window for the rest of us into Hawking’s personal cosmos.

MY BRIEF HISTORY (UAB)(CD)

By Stephen Hawking

ISBN: 9780804164283

Rating: 3.48 by 1 users

Description

Stephen Hawking has dazzled readers worldwide with a string of bestsellers exploring the mysteries of the universe. Now, for the first time, perhaps the most brilliant cosmologist of our age turns his gaze inward for a revealing look at his own life and intellectual evolution.

My Brief History recounts Stephen Hawking’s improbable journey, from his postwar London boyhood to his years of international acclaim and celebrity. This concise, witty, and candid account introduces listeners to a Hawking rarely glimpsed in previous books: the inquisitive schoolboy whose classmates nicknamed him Einstein; the jokester who once placed a bet with a colleague over the existence of a particular black hole; and the young husband and father struggling to gain a foothold in the world of physics and cosmology.

Writing with characteristic humility and humor, Hawking opens up about the challenges that confronted him following his diagnosis of ALS at age twenty-one. Tracing his development as a thinker, he explains how the prospect of an early death urged him onward through numerous intellectual breakthroughs, and talks about the genesis of his masterpiece A Brief History of Time—one of the iconic books of the twentieth century.

Clear-eyed, intimate, and wise, My Brief History opens a window for the rest of us into Hawking’s personal cosmos.

STORY OF THE HUMAN BODY, THE

By Daniel E. Lieberman

ISBN: 9780307379412

Rating: 4.22 by 1 users

Description

In a book that illuminates, as never before, the evolutionary story of the human body, Daniel Lieberman deftly examines the five major transformations which contributed key adaptations to the body: the advent of bipedalism; the shift to a non-fruit based diet; the rise of hunting and gathering and of the species as comprised of superlative endurance athletes; the development of a very large brain; and the incipience of modern cultural abilities.

LIFE WITHOUT LIMITS

By Nick Vujicic

ISBN: 9780307589743

Rating: 4.19 by 25 users

Description

What Would Your Life be Like if Anything Were Possible?

Born without arms or legs, Nick Vujicic overcame his disabilities to live an independent, rich, fulfilling, and “ridiculously good” life while serving as a role model for anyone seeking true happiness. Now an internationally successful motivational speaker, Nick eagerly spreads his central message: the most important goal is to find your life’s purpose and to never give up, despite whatever difficulties or seemingly impossible odds stand in your way.

Nick tells the story of his physical disabilities and the emotional battle he endured while learning to deal with them as a child, teen, and young adult. “For the longest, loneliest time, I wondered if there was anyone on earth like me, and whether there was any purpose to my life other than pain and humiliation.” Nick shares how his faith in God has been his major source of strength, and he explains that once he found a sense of purpose—inspiring others to better their lives and the world around them--he found the confidence to build a rewarding and productive life without limits. Let Nick inspire you to start living your own life without limits.

Includes a Life Without Limits Personal Action Plan to help anyone determine their unique path to a successful life.

TUS ZONAS SAGRADAS

By Wayne W. Dyer

ISBN: 9780345805447

Rating: 0.00 by 0 users

Description

Wayne W. Dyer revela un plan de tres sencillos pasos para encontrar la felicidad y la fortaleza que llevas dentro.

Estos transformativos tres pasos te guiarán en tu búsqueda para localizar ese yo, ese ser mejor y más grande que llevas dentro, y a vivir cada día plenamente con propósito y tranquilidad. Aprenderás a reconocer y aceptar la guía de ese yo sagrado que te permitirá situarte por encima de las dificultades cotidianas, no para desdeñarlas, sino para abordarlas en sus justas proporciones; además, te permitirá irradiar esa recuperada lucidez, de modo que podrás transmitirla a otros.

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL

By Sheri Fink

ISBN: 9780307718969

Rating: 4.12 by 928 users

Description

Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink’s landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina – and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice

In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos.

After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.

SUPERHEROES!

By Laurence Maslon

ISBN: 9780385348584

Rating: 4.33 by 6 users

Description

Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wonder Woman, the Avengers, the X-Men, Watchmen, and more: the companion volume to the PBS documentary series of the same name that tells the story of the superhero in American popular culture.

Together again for the first time, here come the greatest comic book superheroes ever assembled between two covers: down from the heavens—Superman and the Mighty Thor—or swinging over rooftops—the Batman and Spider-Man; star-spangled, like Captain America and Wonder Woman, or clad in darkness, like the Shadow and Spawn; facing down super-villains on their own, like the Flash and the Punisher or gathered together in a team of champions, like the Avengers and the X-Men!

Based on the three-part PBS documentary series Superheroes, this companion volume chronicles the never-ending battle of the comic book industry, its greatest creators, and its greatest creations. Covering the effect of superheroes on American culture—in print, on film and television, and in digital media—and the effect of American culture on its superheroes, Superheroes: Capes, Cowls, and the Creation of Comic Book Culture appeals to readers of all ages, from the casual observer of the phenomenon to the most exacting fan of the genre.

Drawing from more than 50 new interviews conducted expressly for Superheroes!—creators from Stan Lee to Grant Morrison, commentators from Michael Chabon to Jules Feiffer, actors from Adam West to Lynda Carter, and filmmakers such as Zach Snyder—this is an up-to-the-minute narrative history of the superhero, from the comic strip adventurers of the Great Depression, up to the blockbuster CGI movie superstars of the 21st Century. Featuring more than 500 full-color comic book panels, covers, sketches, photographs of both essential and rare artwork, Superheroes is the definitive story of this powerful presence in pop culture.

LEAGUE OF DENIAL

By Mark Fainaru-Wada
Steve Fainaru

ISBN: 9780770437541

Rating: 4.53 by 105 users

Description

“PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS DO NOT SUSTAIN FREQUENT REPETITIVE BLOWS TO THE BRAIN ON A REGULAR BASIS.”
So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: A chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players -- including some of the all-time greats -- to madness.
League of Denial reveals how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage.
Comprehensively, and for the first time, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our 21st century pastime. Everyone knew that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know – and what the league sought to shield from them – is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football; that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage.
In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research -- a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives; and former Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it – questions at the heart of crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MTNS (EBK)

By Tracy Kidder

ISBN: 9781588363343

Rating: 4.20 by 26 users

Description

Tracy Kidder is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, and Home Town. He has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the “master of the non-fiction narrative.” This powerful and inspiring new book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it.

At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer—brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti—blasts through convention to get results.

Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that "the only real nation is humanity" - a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners In Health. He enlists the help of the Gates Foundation, George Soros, the U.N.’s World Health Organization, and others in his quest to cure the world. At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”: as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.

“Mountains Beyond Mountains unfolds with the force of a gathering revelation,” says Annie Dillard, and Jonathan Harr says, “[Farmer] wants to change the world. Certainly this luminous and powerful book will change the way you see it.”

DEATH OF SANTINI, THE (EBK)

By Pat Conroy

ISBN: 9780385530859

Rating: 4.08 by 1 users

Description

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK (EBK)

By Piper Kerman

ISBN: 9780385530262

Rating: 3.67 by 100 users

Description

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES • #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187–424—one of the millions of people who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman’s story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison—why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they’re there.

Praise for Orange Is the New Black

“Fascinating . . . The true subject of this unforgettable book is female bonding and the ties that even bars can’t unbind.”—People (four stars)

“I loved this book. It’s a story rich with humor, pathos, and redemption. What I did not expect from this memoir was the affection, compassion, and even reverence that Piper Kerman demonstrates for all the women she encountered while she was locked away in jail. I will never forget it.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“This book is impossible to put down because [Kerman] could be you. Or your best friend. Or your daughter.”—Los Angeles Times

“Moving . . . transcends the memoir genre’s usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you.”—USA Today

“It’s a compelling awakening, and a harrowing one—both for the reader and for Kerman.”—Newsweek.com

Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.

EMPTY MANSIONS (EBK)

By Bill Dedman
Paul Clark Newell Jr.

ISBN: 9780345545565

Rating: 3.93 by 5 users

Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?

Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world.

Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else.

The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic.

Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms.

Praise for Empty Mansions

“An amazing story of profligate wealth . . . an outsized tale of rags-to-riches prosperity.”—The New York Times

“A fascinating investigation into the haunting true-life tale of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark.”—People

“An exhaustively researched, well-written account . . . a blood-boiling expose [that] will make you angry and will make you sad.”—The Seattle Times

“An evocative and rollicking read, part social history, part hothouse mystery, part grand guignol.”—The Daily Beast

“A childlike, self-exiled eccentric, [Huguette Clark] is the sort of of subject susceptible to a biography of broad strokes, which makes Empty Mansions, the first full-length account of her life, impressive for its delicacy and depth.”—Town & Country

From the Hardcover edition.

BECOMING MR. OCTOBER (EBK)

By Reggie Jackson
Kevin Baker

ISBN: 9780385533126

Rating: 3.11 by 0 users

Description

POWER OF HABIT, THE (EBK)

By Charles Duhigg

ISBN: 9780679603856

Rating: 3.92 by 75 users

Description

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Wall Street Journal • Financial Times

A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.

They succeeded by transforming habits.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Praise for The Power of Habit

“Sharp, provocative, and useful.”—Jim Collins

“Few [books] become essential manuals for business and living. The Power of Habit is an exception. Charles Duhigg not only explains how habits are formed but how to kick bad ones and hang on to the good.”—Financial Times

“A flat-out great read.”—David Allen, bestselling author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“You’ll never look at yourself, your organization, or your world quite the same way.”—Daniel H. Pink, bestselling author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

“Entertaining . . . enjoyable . . . fascinating . . . a serious look at the science of habit formation and change.”—The New York Times Book Review

From the Hardcover edition.

NANTUCKET CHRISTMAS, A (EBK)

By Nancy Thayer

ISBN: 9780345545466

Rating: 3.62 by 1 users

Description

Known for her heartwarming observations of family life, New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer showcases her beloved Nantucket’s snowy off-season in this emotionally gratifying and utterly entertaining story.

Holidays on this Massachusetts island are nothing short of magical, from the jolly decorations on the Brant Point lighthouse to the much anticipated Christmas Stroll, in which merrymakers promenade through quaint streets adorned with Yuletide cheer. The season’s wonderful traditions are much loved by Nicole Somerset, new to Nantucket and recently married to a handsome former attorney. Their home is already full of enticing scents of pine, baking spices, and homemade pie.

But the warm, festive mood is soon tempered by Nicole’s chilly stepdaughter, Kennedy, who arrives without a hint of holiday spirit. Determined to keep her stepmother at arms’ length—or, better yet, out of the picture altogether—Kennedy schemes to sabotage Nicole’s holiday preparations. Nicole, however, is not about to let anyone or anything tarnish her first Christmas with her new husband.

Nancy Thayer’s wonderful tale reminds us that this is the season of miracles. Before the gifts are unwrapped, surprise visitors appear, and holiday joy comes to all, both naughty and nice.

PRAISE FOR NANCY THAYER

Moon Shell Beach

“Nancy Thayer has a deep and masterly understanding of love and friendship, of where the two complement and where they collide.”—New York Times bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand

“A beautifully textured story about love, friendship, and forgiveness, a great beach read. It will make you want to pack your bags for Nantucket.”—New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah

Beachcombers

“Thayer’s sense of place is powerful, and her words are hung together the way my grandmother used to tat lace.”—Dorothea Benton Frank

“A charming and fun summer read . . . Readers will love this story of family and love.”—The Plain Dealer

Summer Breeze

“Nancy Thayer is the queen of beach books. . . . All [these characters] are involved in life-changing choices, with all the heart-wrenching decisions such moments demand.”—The Star-Ledger

“An entertaining and lively read that is perfect for summer reading indulgence.”—Wichita Falls Times Record News

WINNERS (EBK)

By Danielle Steel

ISBN: 9780345539687

Rating: 4.13 by 2 users

Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Even the most perfect lives can be shattered in an instant. In this moving, emotionally charged novel, Danielle Steel introduces readers to an unforgettable cast of characters striving to overcome tragedy and discover the inner resources and resilience to win at life—once again.

WINNERS

Lily Thomas is an aspiring ski champion training for the Olympics, a young woman with her heart set on winning the gold. But in one moment, Lily’s future is changed forever, her hopes for the Olympics swept away in a tragic accident.

Dr. Jessie Matthews, the neurosurgeon who operates on her that night, endures a tragedy of her own, and instantly becomes the sole support of her four young children, while her own future hangs in the balance.

Bill, Lily’s father, has pinned all his hopes on his only daughter, his dreams now shattered.

Other lives will entwine themselves with theirs: Joe, a financial manager, faces a ruined career at the hand of a dishonest partner. Carole, a psychologist at Mass General, is a breast cancer survivor, her body and heart scarred by what she’s been through. Teddy, with a spinal cord injury worse than Lily’s, dreams of college and becoming an artist.

From the ashes of their lives, six people fight to alter the course of destiny and refuse to be defeated. When Bill builds a remarkable rehab facility for his daughter, countless lives are forever altered, and each becomes a winner.

Winners is about refusing to be beaten, no matter how insurmountable the challenge. And when Lily gets on skis again and enters the Paralympics, the battle to brave life again is won.

Winners is about more than surviving, it is about courage, victory, and triumph. When all appears to be lost, the battle has just begun.

From the Hardcover edition.

BRIDGET JONES: LOCA (EBK)

By Helen Fielding

ISBN: 9780804169516

Rating: 3.41 by 0 users

Description

BONES OF PARIS, THE (EBK)

By Laurie R. King

ISBN: 9780345531773

Rating: 3.52 by 2 users

Description

New York Times bestselling author Laurie R. King, beloved for her acclaimed Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, consistently writes richly detailed and thoroughly suspenseful novels that bring a distant time and place to brilliant life. Now, in this thrilling new book, King leads readers into the vibrant and sensual Paris of the Jazz Age—and reveals the darkest secrets of its denizens.

Paris, France: September 1929. For Harris Stuyvesant, the assignment is a private investigator’s dream—he’s getting paid to troll the cafés and bars of Montparnasse, looking for a pretty young woman. The American agent has a healthy appreciation for la vie de bohème, despite having worked for years at the U.S. Bureau of Investigation. The missing person in question is Philippa Crosby, a twenty-two year old from Boston who has been living in Paris, modeling and acting. Her family became alarmed when she stopped all communications, and Stuyvesant agreed to track her down. He wholly expects to find her in the arms of some up-and-coming artist, perhaps experimenting with the decadent lifestyle that is suddenly available on every rue and boulevard.

As Stuyvesant follows Philippa’s trail through the expatriate community of artists and writers, he finds that she is known to many of its famous—and infamous—inhabitants, from Shakespeare and Company’s Sylvia Beach to Ernest Hemingway to the Surrealist photographer Man Ray. But when the evidence leads Stuyvesant to the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Montmartre, his investigation takes a sharp, disturbing turn. At the Grand-Guignol, murder, insanity, and sexual perversion are all staged to shocking, brutal effect: depravity as art, savage human nature on stage.

Soon it becomes clear that one missing girl is a drop in the bucket. Here, amid the glittering lights of the cabarets, hides a monster whose artistic coup de grâce is to be rendered in blood. And Stuyvesant will have to descend into the darkest depths of perversion to find a killer . . . sifting through The Bones of Paris.

Praise for The Bones of Paris

“Fans of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris will feel right at home in the Jazz Age Paris setting. . . . Beyond the cameos and the bohemian atmosphere, there is a compelling thriller here and some fascinating fictional characters to go with the real-life ones. As always with King, the plot is tricky but marvelously constructed, delivering twists that not only surprise but also deepen the story and its multiple levels of meaning. Break out that dusty bottle of absinthe you have stored away and settle in for a treat.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Impressive . . . arresting . . . a tantalizing mystery involving the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol and artists who use human bones to create their work. Readers will hope to see more of Grey . . . and Stuyvesant in future books.”—Publishers Weekly

“The dark side of Jazz Age Paris . . . evocative period detail and challenging aesthetic adventures . . . King presents Stuyvesant’s tour of the lower depths of the Parisian avant-garde in terms both decorous and creepy.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Hardcover edition.

DARK PLACES (EBK)

By Gillian Flynn

ISBN: 9780307459923

Rating: 3.89 by 185 users

Description

I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” As her family lay dying, little Libby fled their tiny farmhouse into the freezing January snow. She lost some fingers and toes, but she survived–and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, Ben sits in prison, and troubled Libby lives off the dregs of a trust created by well-wishers who’ve long forgotten her.

The Kill Club is a macabre secret society obsessed with notorious crimes. When they locate Libby and pump her for details–proof they hope may free Ben–Libby hatches a plan to profit off her tragic history. For a fee, she’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club . . . and maybe she’ll admit her testimony wasn’t so solid after all.

As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the narrative flashes back to January 2, 1985. The events of that day are relayed through the eyes of Libby’s doomed family members–including Ben, a loner whose rage over his shiftless father and their failing farm have driven him into a disturbing friendship with the new girl in town. Piece by piece, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started–on the run from a killer.

SHARP OBJECTS (EBK)

By Gillian Flynn

ISBN: 9780307351487

Rating: 3.85 by 200 users

Description

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart
Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.

NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg
Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.

HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle
As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.

With its taut, crafted writing, Sharp Objects is addictive, haunting, and unforgettable.

LISTENING FOR LUCCA (EBK)

By Suzanne M LaFleur

ISBN: 9780307980311

Rating: 3.82 by 0 users

Description

"I'm obsessed with abandoned things." Siena's obsession began a year and a half ago, around the time her two-year-old brother Lucca stopped talking. Now Mom and Dad are moving the family from Brooklyn to Maine hoping that it will mean a whole new start for Lucca and Siena. She soon realizes that their wonderful old house on the beach holds secrets. When Siena writes in her diary with an old pen she found in her closet, the pen writes its own story, of Sarah and Joshua, a brother and sister who lived in the same house during World War II. As the two stories unfold, amazing parallels begin to appear, and Siena senses that Sarah and Joshua's story might contain the key to unlocking Lucca's voice.

BOOK THIEF, THE (EBK)

By Markus Zusak

ISBN: 9780307433848

Rating: 4.36 by 824 users

Description

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel Meminger's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Grave Digger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up and closed down.

CALVIN COCONUT: EX(CVN#9)(EBK)

By Graham Salisbury
Jacqueline Rogers

ISBN: 9780307974273

Rating: 3.67 by 0 users

Description

There are zombies at Kailua beach!! Well, kind of. Fourth-grader Calvin Coconut and his friends have been recruited by Benny Obi (the boy from Kung Fooey who liked to tell crazy stories and ate bugs) to be extras in his uncle's movie: Zombie Zoomba! And who ends up with an actual part? Calvin's babysitter, Stella.

OF BEAST AND BEAUTY (EBK)

By Stacey Jay

ISBN: 9780307981424

Rating: 4.06 by 12 users

Description

In the beginning was the darkness, and in the darkness was a girl, and in the girl was a secret...

In the domed city of Yuan, the blind Princess Isra, a Smooth Skin, is raised to be a human sacrifice whose death will ensure her city’s vitality. In the desert outside Yuan, Gem, a mutant beast, fights to save his people, the Monstrous, from starvation. Neither dreams that together, they could return balance to both their worlds.

Isra wants to help the city’s Banished people, second-class citizens despised for possessing Monstrous traits. But after she enlists the aid of her prisoner, Gem, who has been captured while trying to steal Yuan’s enchanted roses, she begins to care for him, and to question everything she has been brought up to believe.

As secrets are revealed and Isra’s sight, which vanished during her childhood, returned, Isra will have to choose between duty to her people and the beast she has come to love.

From the Hardcover edition.

MOJO (EBK)

By Tim Tharp

ISBN: 9780375895807

Rating: 3.20 by 0 users

Description

All Dylan wants is mojo. What is mojo? It's power. The ability to command respect. It's everything Dylan doesn't have. He gets no respect at school, and when he finds the dead body of a classmate, even the police push him around. All the thanks he gets for trying to help the investigation with his crime drama skills is a new nickname at school: Body Bag. So when Dylan hears about a missing rich girl from the other side of town, he jumps at the chance to dive into this mystery. Surely if he cracks a case involving a girl this beautiful and this rich, he'll get not only a hefty cash reward, but the mojo he's looking for.

His investigation takes him into the world of an elite private high school and an underground club called Gangland. As Dylan—along with his loyal friends Audrey and Randy—falls down the rabbit hole, lured by the power of privilege, he begins to lose himself. And the stakes of the game keep getting higher.

NINE DAYS (EBK)

By Fred Hiatt

ISBN: 9780307977274

Rating: 3.54 by 2 users

Description

A fast-paced contemporary thriller in the vein of James Patterson and Anthony Horowitz set against the bustling backdrop of Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the border of China. This heart-pounding adventure takes place as two teens, an American teenage boy and his friend, a Chinese girl from his Washington, DC-area high school, must find her father who has been kidnapped—and they only have nine days. Although the characters in the novel are fictionalized, they are based on a real Chinese family who were part of the Chinese Democracy Movement and inspired this story.

DAYS OF FIRE (EBK)

By Peter Baker

ISBN: 9780385536929

Rating: 4.14 by 0 users

Description

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL (EBK)

By Sheri Fink

ISBN: 9780307718983

Rating: 4.12 by 53 users

Description

ENRIQUE'S JOURNEY (EBK)

By Sonia Nazario

ISBN: 9781588366023

Rating: 3.78 by 4 users

Description

None

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